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ESSAYS 


K 

S    S    A    Y 

By 
Percy  Stickney  Grant 

s 

:^(ew  Tork 

Harper  &'  Bros. 

MCMXXII 

-y^mm-^^ 

Copyright  1922  by 
Percy  Stickney  Grant 


Arranged  and  Printed  at 
The  Cheltenham  Press 

;  I^fw  Yark   .  . 


a: 

M 
►J 


TO 
Joseph  s.  Auerbach 

MEMBER  OF  THE  NEW  YORK  BAR 

A  GENIUS  IN  HIS  PROFESSION 

AN  IDEALIST  WHO  KNOWS  AND  LOVES   THE    BIBLE 

A  WONDERFUL  FRIEND 


34=^.-^^n9 


Contents 

Page 
Is  Bernard  Shaw  an  Immortal? 9 


Browning's  Art  in  Monologue 33 


The  Religion  of  Shakespeare 75 


Feodor  Dostoevsky 92 


The  Elegiac  Tone  in  Sculpture 129 


The  Last  of  the  Poets 151 


Is  Bernard   Shaw  an  Immortal? 

ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON,  on  his  first  jour- 
ney across  the  United  States,  was  amused  by  an 
^  American  fellow-traveler,  who  inquired  his  name 
and  his  business,  but  then  relapsed  into  silence,  evidently 
convinced,  says  Stevenson,  "He  had  plucked  out  the 
heart  of  my  mystery."  Americans,  it  may  well  be, 
fancy  that  they  easily  plumb  the  human  depths.  I  my- 
self may  be  about  to  illustrate  this  national  conceit.  So 
take  note  that  modesty  is  not  encouraged  by  the  com- 
panionship of  Shaw. 

Although  (fortunately  for  you)  I  am  in  possession  of 
the  key  to  G.  B.  S.  I  do  not  intend  to  open  many  doors. 
I  shall  not  drag  you  over  the  whole  establishment,  but 
just  glance  into  a  few  rooms. 

A  reactionary  criticism,  in  New  York,  given  a  wide 
audience,  inculcates  the  notion  that  Shaw  is  not  serious; 
that  he  cannot  write  well  constructed  plays;  that  his 
subjects  are  too  much  from  the  clash  of  his  time  to  be 
universal  in  their  appeal  and  that,  consequently,  his 
plays  will  not  last.  These  are  the  rooms  in  Shaw's 
house-beautiful  that  I  wish  to  enter. 

You  may  go  away  from  our  seance  asking  yourself  a 
hundred  questions  (such  is  the  contagion  of  Shaw's  men- 
tal activity)  a  hundred  questions  which  I  have  not  an- 

[9I 


swered.  I  hope  this  may  be  the  case.  Do  not  on  this 
account  regret  your  dollars.  The  power  to  ask  a  new 
question  is  worth  paying  for;  in  addition,  as  you  see, 
I  contract  to  answer  three  or  four  old  ones. 

Is  Bernard  Shaw  an  Immortal?  At  the  age  of  60,  hav- 
ing been  a  public  person  in  England  for  nearly  a  quarter 
of  a  century,  Mr.  Shaw  appears  to  his  fellow-citizens 
incomprehensible.  "The  fact  is,"  said  a  writer  in  the 
Century  Magazine,  just  before  the  war,  "Shaw  is  still  a 
hopeless  enigma  to  the  general  public,  a  personal  prob- 
lem, defying  solution;  an  evasive  though  brilliant  intel- 
lect that  mystifies  by  striking  for  and  against  every  sub- 
ject he  discusses." 

Even  the  New  Republic  had  an  article  by  a  friendly 
hand  entitled:  "Mr.  Shaw's  Diverted  Genius,"  which 
contends  that  genius  should  stand  apart  from  public 
affairs  and  authoritatively  issue  its  special  edicts;  that  it 
should  not  jostle  with  the  crowd  or  rush  to  the  defense 
of  the  weak.  Mr.  Shaw  is  accused  of  having  fallen  into 
the  "habit  of  mechanically  refusing  to  take  things  at 
their  face  value.  Faced  with  an  egg  he  would  impute 
disingenuousness  to  the  hen."  So  he  sees  disingenuous- 
ness  everywhere,  in  Viscount  Grey  and  British  official- 
dom. 

Before  the  war  an  enigma;  in  war-time  a  diverted 
genius.  Which  would  you  prefer  to  be, — a  Chinese 
puzzle  or  a  fish  out  of  water? 

The  storm  of  abuse  and  misconception  that  beat  upon 

[10] 


Shaw  in  the  English  press  for  his  strictures  on  the  war 
during  its  first  months,  affords  convincing  proof  that  it 
is  one  thing  to  amuse  select,  even  large,  theatre  audiences 
and  quite  another  to  educate  citizens  into  disciples. 

Here  in  America,  whenever  Shaw's  name  is  men- 
tioned, there  is  an  invariable  question:  "Do  you  really 
think  Shaw  is  serious?"  The  counterpart  to  this  query 
forty  years  ago  was  a  similar  literary  puzzling,  "Is  not 
Thackeray  a  cynic?"  How  odd  that  Shaw  now  laughs 
at  Thackeray  for  being  a  sentimentalist,  just  as  your 
children  will  laugh  at  Shaw  for  being  too  serious,  too 
ascetic,  too  abstemious,  too  religious. 

But  cannot  we  learn  something  substantial  about  our 
enigma?  Who's  Who  in  the  Theatre  has  no  room  for 
nonsense.     What  does  it  say? 

"George  Bernard  Shaw,  dramatic  author,  born  in 
Dublin,  July  26,  1856;  son  of  the  late  George  Carr  and 
Lucinda  Shaw;  married  Charlotte  Frances  Payne- 
Townshend;  his  first  play  Widowers'  Houses  was  pro- 
duced at  the  Royalty  Theatre,  under  the  auspices  of  the 
Independent  Theatre  in  Dec,  1892,  This  was  followed 
by  the  production  of  Arms  and  the  Man,  at  the  Avenue, 
April,  1894.  During  the  following  ten  years  his  plays 
were  performed  chiefly  in  Germany,  America  and  the 
provinces,  and  remained  practically  unknown  in  London, 
except  through  private  subscription  performances  and 
through  their  publication  in  a  more  readable  form  than 
the   old-fashioned    acting   editions.      Mr.    Shaw   is    the 

[II] 


author  of  the  following  plays:  The  Man  of  Destiny,  1897; 
Candida,  1897;  Caesar  and  Cleopatra,  1899;  The  Devil's 
Disciple,  1899;  You  Never  Can  Tell,  1900;  Captain 
Brassbound's  Conversion,  1900;  Mrs.  Warren's  Profes- 
sion, 1902;  The  Admirable  Bashville,  1903;  John  Bull's 
Other  Island,  1904;  The  Philanderer,  1905;  Man  and 
Superman,  1905;  How  He  Lied  to  Her  Husband,  1905; 
Major  Barbara,  1905;  The  Doctor's  Dilemma,  1906; 
Getting  Married,  1908;  Press  Cuttings,  1909;  The 
Shewing  Up  of  Blanco  Posnet,  1909;  Misalliance,  1910; 
The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets,  1910;  Fanny's  First 
Play,  191 1;  Overruled,  1912.  Of  these  Mrs.  Warren's 
Profession  and  The  Shewing  Up  of  Blanco  Posnet  were 
censored  and  cannot  be  publicly  performed  in  Great 
Britain.  In  addition,  he  has  written  Pygmalion,  Great 
Catherine  and  Androcles  and  the  Lion.  During  the 
Bedrenne-Barker  regime  at  the  Court,  1904-6,  Mr.  Shaw's 
plays  were  the  predominating  features  of  the  enterprise. 
He  was  art  critic  to  the  World  and  Truth;  was  musical 
critic  to  the  World,  the  Star  and  dramatic  critic  to  the 
Saturday  Review.  He  has  written  novels,  many  works 
on  Fabianism  and  Socialism  and  on  the  works  of  Ibsen  and 
Wagner.  His  Dramatic  Opinions  and  Essays  were  re- 
printed from  the  Saturday  Review  in  1907.  Is  well 
known  as  a  platform  speaker  and  agitator  of  social  and 
religious  questions;  is  a  member  of  the  Academic  Com- 
mittee, and  the  Dramatic  Committee  of  the  Society  of 
Authors.      His    plays    have    been    translated    and    per- 

[12] 


formed  all  over  the  continent  of  Europe  and  in  America, 
Australia,  etc.  Address  lo  Adelphi  Terrace,  W.  C, 
Telegraphic  address  Socialist,  Westrand,  London." 

If  you  set  out  to  learn  something  about  Shaw  from 
other  sources  than  his  plays,  you  meet,  as  you  see,  with 
difficulties.  Who's  Who  is  a  death's  head  caricature, 
bare  of  reference  to  his  boyhood  and  poverty  in  Dublin 
and  to  the  struggles  of  his  young  manhood  in  London — 
that  is  to  say,  to  the  influences  which  forced  his  mental 
development.  A  colorless,  clammy  catalogue  cannot 
help  us  with  Shaw. 

His  biographers,  on  the  other  hand,  are  over-burdened 
by  his  many-sidedness.  They  either  pelt  him  with  para- 
doxes like  Chesterton;  hail  him  as  a  brother-revolution- 
ist like  McCabe;  treat  him  with  Boswellian  minuteness 
of  analysis,  plus  a  moral  qualm  like  Henderson;  or  wor- 
ship him  like  his  French  biographer,  Augustin  Hamon. 

Shaw's  portrait  may  be  drawn  without  making  him  a 
Mephistopheles,  or  a  Moses,  or  without  calling  out  to 
him:  "Blow,  Machiavelli,  blow,"  as  some  of  the  haters 
of  his  cool  self-advertisement  might  be  tempted  to  do. 

His  Dublin  birth;  his  going  to  work  at  the  age  of  15; 
his  r-Igration  to  London  at  21;  his  communistic  anar- 
chism and  Hyde  Park  oratory;  his  hearing  Henry  George 
and  conversion  to  single  tax;  his  joining  the  Fabian 
Society  and  writing  for  it;  his  plodding  throughout  his 
twenties  at  literary  productions  which  nobody  paid  for; 
supported  meanwhile  on  the  slenderest  fare — vegetarian 

[13   ] 


— by  his  mother's  daily  sixpence,  earned  by  her  music- 
teaching;  his  friendship  with  William  Archer,  which  led 
to  his  being  given  a  job  at  the  age  of  29  to  write  art 
criticism, — later  music  critiques,  then  dramatic, — these 
rather  commonplace,  if  not  sordid,  conditions  are  im- 
portant biological  fragments  and  come  near  telling  his 
whole  story.  They  come  near  to  plucking  the  heart  out 
of  his  mystery. 

I  know  of  no  author  whose  life  more  exactly  explains 
his  writing.  This  was  necessarily  the  case  in  one  unen- 
cumbered with  university  training  and  tradition,  which 
too  often  hold  the  mind  back  from  fresh  enthusiasm  by 
their  insistence  that  the  classics  are  the  only  models  for 
literary  form  and  that  history  is  mere  repetition. 

If  we  find  Shaw  perplexing,  why  do  we  ignore  his  love 
for  autobiography?  What  can  be  more  explicit  than  his 
own   confessions   and   self-explanations? 

Much  of  this  misunderstanding  about  Shaw  is  preju- 
dice. What  the  English  don't  like  about  him  is,  at 
bottom,  his  race — the  Irish  always  fighting  with  them 
and  laughing  at  them.  Either  the  English  cannot 
understand  the  Irish  brand  of  self-assertion  and  humor  or 
they  loathe  it.  For  the  Irishman  laughs  at  everything 
including  himself.  Nor  do  the  English  comprehend 
how  a  man  can  laugh  at  himself  without  being  a  mounte- 
bank. Humor  to  them  is  a  personal  libel;  the  truer  it  is 
the  worse  it  is.     The  Irish,  on  the  contrary,  see  them- 

[14] 


selves  as  others  see  them,  and  appreciate  how  funny  they 
are. 

A  Socialist  friend  of  mine — an  Orangeman — told  me 
that  Socialism  did  not  succeed  in  Ireland.  When  the 
Irish  delegates  to  Socialist  conventions  met  to  discuss 
their  theories  as  a  cure  for  Ireland's  ills,  they  looked 
into  each  other's  faces  and  burst  out  laughing. 

The  current  prejudice  against  Shaw  I,  myself,  for  a 
long  time,  shared.  I  even  resented  his  affront  to  British 
dignity. 

His  prefaces,  brilliant  but  egotistical,  to  an  extent 
unheard  of  in  English  letters,  seemed  to  perform  the 
service  of  a  mirror  to  G.  B.  S.  in  which  his  vanity  could 
behold  his  full  measure.  He  not  only  seized  oppor- 
tunity; he  went  forth  and  manufactured  occasion  for 
standing  in  the  lime-light.  He  insulted  well-disposed 
hostesses  to  be  headlined  as  an  unaccountable,  in- 
credibly witty  and  terrible  personage.  He  was  a  social 
highwayman  who  held  up  his  victims  for  their  reputation, 
for  their  esprit  and  left  them  ridiculously  impoverished 
before  the  public,  with  their  brains  turned  inside  out, 
reduced  to  the  mental  poverty  of  fools.  His  endless 
public  controversy,  his  pushing  and  puffing,  his  naked 
display  of  personality,  with  the  vanity,  buffoonery  and 
wildness  that  underlay  it — Englishmen  could  not  tolerate 
nor  could  anyone  else  with  their  prepossessions.  Shaw 
seemed  the  perpetrator  of  a  continual  hoax  upon  the 
public,  at  which  he  raised  his  eyebrows  in  sinister  de- 

[15] 


rision,  as  it  squirmed  with  resentment  and  perplexity; — 
a  revealer  of  sham  infernos,  standing  by  the  side  of  a 
trap-door  on  a  stage,  when  in  the  end  the  furious  flames 
turned  out  to  be  nothing  but  a  matter  of  red  fire  pro- 
vided for  a  gaping  audience,  to  which  he  furnished  its 
money's  worth  of  thrills  and  shocks.  Insatiable  vanity 
wrapped  up  with  insincerity  in  lectures  and  laughter — 
that  seemed  to  me  a  good  enough  formula  for  Shaw. 

The  first  light  that  turned  me  to  Shaw  was  Fanny's 
reply  to  Trotter  who  had  assured  her  that  he  went  in 
for  the  serious  side,  short  of  course  of  making  himself 
ridiculous. 

Fanny.  "What,  not  make  yourself  ridiculous  for  the 
sake  of  a  good  cause?  Oh,  Mr.  Trotter.  That's 
vieux  jeu." 

That  reversal  of  all  the  English  and  American  dread  of 
ridicule  will  carry  a  man  or  a  woman  as  far  as  one 
generation  needs  to  go. 

Not  only  did  I  find  myself  in  the  company  of  a  man 
who  had  mastered  the  most  cowardly  and  stubborn  of 
fears — the  fear  of  ridicule,  but  I  found  him  sustaining  a 
favorite  older  philosophy  of  mine,  that  of  the  third  Earl 
of  Shaftesbury.  Had  I  not  bought  Shaftesbury  in  two 
fine  old  editions  because  there  I  found  comments  upon  a 
still  older  voice,  Gorgias  in  Aristotle,  crying  Shaw's 
cry  twenty-five  hundred  years  ago:  "Seria  risu,  Risum 
Seriis  discutere,"  to  Latinize  the  Greek — which  means, 
says  Shaftesbury,  humor  is  the  only  test  of  gravity  and 

[i6] 


gravity  of  humor.  For  a  subject  which  will  not  bear 
raillery  is  suspicious  and  a  jest  that  cannot  bear  a  serious 
examination  is  certainly  false  wit." 

Shaftesbury,  two  hundred  years  ago,  contended  for 
the  free  use  of  humor  in  religion  and  went  to  Greek 
philosophy  for  authorities.  In  Shaw's  plays  I  found  in 
active  dramatic  battle  this  further  extension  of  the 
meaning  of  humor.  His  humor  was  used  to  religious 
ends.  How  much  alike,  Shaftesbury's  philosophy  and 
Shaw's!  Hear  one  then  the  other.  Shaftesbury  com- 
plains: "But  some  gentlemen  there  are  so  full  of  the 
Spirit  of  Bigotry,  and  false  Zeal,  that  when  they  hear 
Principles  examin'd,  Sciences  and  Arts  inquir'd  into, 
and  Matters  of  Importance  treated  with  this  frankness 
of  Humour,  they  imagine  presently  that  all  professions 
must  fall  to  the  ground,  all  Establishments  come  to  ruin, 
and  nothing  orderly  or  decent  be  left  standing  in  the 
world.  They  fear,  or  pretend  to  fear,  that  Religion 
itself  will  be  endangered  by  this  free  way,  and  are  there- 
fore as  much  alarm'd  at  this  liberty  in  private  conversa- 
tion, and  under  prudent  Management,  as  if  it  were 
grossly  used  in  publick  Company  or  before  the  Solemest 
Assembly."* 

Now  hear  Shaw:  He  calls  "Morality  the  substitution 
of  custom  for  conscience."  "Nowadays  we  do  not  seem 
to  know  that  there  is  any  test  of  conduct  except  morality; 
and  the  result  is  that  the  young  had  better  have  their 

*Shaftesbury  Characteristics  Wit  and  Humor,  vol.  i,  p.  74. 
[17] 


souls  awakened  by  disgrace,  capture  by  the  police  and  a 
month's  hard  labor  than  drift  along  from  their  cradles 
to  their  graves,  doing  what  other  people  do  for  no  other 
reason  than  that  other  people  do  it  and  knowing  nothing 
of  good  or  evil,  of  courage  or  cowardice  or  indeed  any- 
thing but  how  to  keep  hunger  and  concupiscence  and 
fashionable  dressing  within  the  bounds  of  good  taste, 
except  when  their  excesses  can  be  concealqd.  "I  hate 
to  see  dead  people  walking  about;  it  is  unnatural."  St. 
John  and  Shaftesbury  composed  that  sentence  together. 
"I  know  thy  works  that  thou  hast  a  name  that  thou 
livest  and  art  dead."  Sounds  from  the  Book  of  Revela- 
tion, but  with  humor  added.  English  drama  in  its 
early  development  associated  comedy  closely  with  re- 
ligious symbolism.  Roaring  farces  preceded  the  morali- 
ties. 

In  short,  I  found  in  Shaw's  theatre  humor  playing 
for  the  serious  side  of  life  according  to  the  best  precept 
of  the  part.  He  was  in  the  line  of  the  great  seers  of  truth 
and  the  great  regenerators  of  men — not  a  buffoon  but 
a  prophet. 

Yes,  Shaw  is  rather  exactly  fulfilling  the  role  of  Hebrew 
prophet.  Like  his  prototype,  he  declares  himself 
frankly  upon  personal  and  political  problems  without 
the  responsibility  of  office.  He  does  not  have  to  think 
of  the  consistency  supposed  to  exist  between  pronounce- 
ments and  platforms  or  between  pulpits  and  creeds. 
He  disclaims  all  responsibility  for  British  institutions, 

[i8] 


except  that  of  criticizing  them.  An  arch-critic  in  his 
detachment,  he  becomes  a  consummate  anarchist,  levy- 
ing upon  the  state  the  tribute  of  attention  and  conviction . 

While  everybody  in  church  and  state  incensed  by 
extremists  and  their  counsels  of  perfection,  proclaims 
compromise  to  be  the  only  ideal  for  the  very  members 
of  these  institutions,  Shaw  rocks  with  revolution  every 
organism  in  which  men  co-operate  with  each  other.  He 
shakes  the  ground  of  past  attainment  under  their  feet. 
He  is  the  extraordinary  spectacle  of  modern  democracy 
— a  man  challenging  the  basis  of  every  institution  (as 
much  a  foe  to  the  state  as  the  early  Christians)  yet 
living  quietly  and  comfortably  under  the  law  of  King 
George  and  Mrs.  Grundy.  An  ascetic  individualism 
which  in  past  ages  would  have  retired  from  the  world  to 
enjoy  monastic  seclusion,  and  tend  a  vineyard,  rushes 
as  a  revolutionary  force  into  modern  life  to  secure  to 
fathers,  mothers,  children  the  material  and  spiritual 
advantage  of  Socialism.  He  is  contradiction  inherent 
in  the  anarchism  of  chartered  criticism  and  in  the  freedom 
of  the  unfettered  prophecy:  perhaps  more,  he  is  free- 
speech  using  its  freedom;  he  is  democracy  in  motion. 

You  may  be  tiring  of  my  personal  tone — at  the  slow 
steps  of  my  pilgrimage  to  the  sage  of  lo  Adelphi  Terrace, 
W.  C,  whose  telegraphic  address  is  Socialist.  You  are 
saying,  perhaps,  it  is  all  very  well  for  Socialists,  heretics, 
reformers,  suffragists,  to  be  charmed  by  a  teaching  that 
lifts  them  above  the  power  of  ridicule  which  they  richly 

[19] 


deserve,  and  should  receive — if  the  jails  happen  to  be 
full.  It  is  all  very  well  for  parsons  to  find  strains  from 
Patmos  in  Hibernian  comedy.  But  we  who  sit  before 
you  are  not  too  much  the  friends  of  these;  it  is  enough 
that  we  have  to  endure  a  creature  who  says  that  marriage 
is  the  most  licentious  of  institutions,  which  is  the  reason 
of  its  popularity.  A  veritable  Pagliacci  who  proclaims: 
"Like  all  dramatists  and  mimes  of  genuine  vocation,  I  am 
a  natural  born  mountebank."  "I  leave  the  delicacies  of 
retirement  to  those  who  are  gentlemen  first  and  literary 
workmen  afterward.  The  cart  and  the  trumpet  for 
me."  What  can  you  say  that  will  reconcile  us  to  this 
befouler  of  the  home,  this  street-vendor  of  his  own  wares, 
this  self-confessed  mountebank? 

This  is  my  reply:  Why  cannot  you  and  I  be  cured 
together  of  prejudice  and  shocks?  I  blush  to  admit 
that  when  Candida  was  first  given  in  America  I  would 
not  see  it  because  I  did  not  propose  to  pay  Shaw  for 
making  a  fool  of  a  clergyman.  Think  what  I  lost! 
Are  you  in  any  worse  plight  of  ignorant  alarm? 

How  does  one  get  over  this  antagonism  to  Shaw? 
Let  us  see.  I  got  over  it  by  the  discovery  that  Shaw  was 
putting  upon  the  stage  plays  which  contained  more  of  the 
fullness  and  intricacy  of  modern  life  than  any  other 
playwright.  That  the  world  was  a  bigger  and  more  im- 
portant place  in  his  theatre  than  in  any  other.  That 
here  was  a  man,  self-educated,  handicapped  by  the  preju- 
dice felt   in   London    against    Irishmen,    against    men 

[20] 


without  connections  or  wealth,  especially  against  Social- 
ists and  agitators,  who  made  his  way  up  until  he  stood 
among  the  most  privileged  political  and  social  powers 
in  the  world.  Shyness,  silence,  down-heartedness  are 
not  the  weapons  for  mortal  combat.  Self-confidence 
and  self-assertion  or  nothing  must  be  used.  Remember, 
too,  that  behind  the  English  character,  if  we  are  to  be- 
lieve its  greatest  native  delineators,  there  is  something 
of  the  snob  and  the  bully  which  can  only  be  moved  by  its 
own  medicine — contempt  and  challenge.  To  kick  the 
man  below  you  and  to  lick  the  boot  of  the  man  above, 
is  the  inevitable  pliability  of  a  rigid  society  depending 
upon  an  upper  privileged  class.  In  Pygmalion,  Henry 
Higgins  (the  hero)  starts  out  by  bullying  Liza,  the 
flower-girl,  and  keeps  it  up  until  the  curtain  goes  down. 
His  last  chuckle  is  a  blow.  He  knew  that  the  brute  in 
man  rules  women  of  the  lower  classes;  but  bullying 
suited  his  middle-class  nature  and  methods.  Anyone 
who  has  seen  a  booted  Englishman  in  India  kick  a 
naked  native,  is  willing  to  say  that  Shaw  understood  how 
to  deal  with  his  adopted  countrymen;  his  blackguard 
pose  of  insolent  superiority  is  merely  a  device  for  making 
the  punishment  fit  the  crime. 

For  his  higher  aerial  mastery,  Shaw  has  to  manoeuvre 
his  Pegasus  to  a  position  above  his  opponent,  from  which 
he  can  mercilessly  attack  him.  He  took  a  high  tone. 
A  wild  Irishman  and  Hyde  Park  orator  plagued  duch- 
esses and  bewildered  the  non-conformist  conscience.    An 

[21] 


unplayed  dramatist  belittled  Shakespeare.  Shaw  seemed 
to  do  naturally  what  Lord  Northcliffe  expected  his  staff 
to  do.  "To  raise  hell  with  everybody."  For  Shaw  to 
receive  attention  was  to  receive  encouragement;  for  him 
to  stir  up  discussion  and  counter  attacks  was  to  succeed. 
His  attitudinizing  was  quite  self-conscious.  "The  trum- 
pet and  the  cart  for  me."  This  pose  which  can  be  called 
any  name  we  reserve  for  self-advertisers;  this  Grub-street 
Barnumism  shows  what  it  can  become  when,  during 
the  war,  we  saw  one  man  stand  against  his  own  nation, 
its  statesmen,  generals,  editors,  clergy,  although  they 
were  united  and  proudly  angry  from  war.  Will  he  be 
heard?  Yes,  he  is  heard.  No  solitary  unofficial  pen  has 
dared  so  much,  except  perhaps  Zola  and  Hugo  and 
Harden,  since  Voltaire. 

But  cannot  we  take  Shaw's  word  for  it  that  he  is 
serious? 

"People  talk  all  this  nonsense  about  my  plays  because 
they  have  been  to  the  theatre  so  much,  that  they  have 
lost  their  sense  of  the  unreality  and  insincerity  of  the 
romantic  drama.  They  take  stage  human  nature  for 
real  human  nature,  whereas,  of  course,  real  human  nature 
is  the  bitterest  satire  on  stage  human  nature.  The  result 
is  that  when  I  try  to  put  real  human  nature  on  the 
stage,  they  think  that  I  am  laughing  at  them.  They 
flatter  themselves  enormously  for  I  am  not  thinking  of 
them  at  all;  I  am  simply  writing  natural  history  very 
carefully  and  laboriously,  and  they  are  expecting  some- 

[22] 


thing  else.  I  can  imagine  a  Japansee  who  had  ordered 
a  family  portrait  of  himself,  and  expected  it  to  be  in 
the  Japanese  convention  as  to  design,  being  exceedingly 
annoyed  if  the  artist  handed  him  a  photograph  however 
artistic,  because  it  was  like  him  in  a  natural  way.  He 
would  accuse  the  photographer  of  making  fun  of  him 
and  of  having  his  tongue  in  his  cheek. 

We  confound  seriousness  as  an  end  with  seriousness 
of  method,  which  is  quite  another  thing.  The  end  of 
life  is  serious  enough;  but  we  do  not  carry  a  daily  death's 
head.  English  puritanism  insists  that  a  serious  man 
is  serious  in  all  his  ways, — serious  when  he  sits  down 
and  when  he  rises  up;  serious  in  his  tragedy  and  in  his 
comedy;  and  that  when  seriousness  ends  there  he  must 
stop.  This  long-faced  tradition  crops  out  in  Emerson's 
disparagement  of  laughter  and  in  the  failure  Mark 
Twain  suffered  in  his  assault  upon  the  Boston  literary 
Olympus.  This  theory  of  laughter  united  in  hypocritical 
union,  museums  as  places  of  self-improvement  with  the 
stage  as  a  place  of  entertainment.  This  theory  got  the 
Englishman  dubbed  a  man  who  took  his  pleasures  sadly 
and  what  is  worse  labelled  him  a  Pharisee. 

Shaw's  formula  is:  Be  sure  of  your  fact,  then  express 
it  as  flippantly  as  you  please.  This  is  only  another  way 
of  saying  that  when  you  present  a  truth  to  the  world 
you  should  make  it  attractive.     This   too  is  nature's 

*ArchibaId  Henderson's,  George  Bernard  Shaw,  "His  Life  and  Works," 
p.  411- 

[23I 


way — to  dress  gaily;  to  form  charmingly  or  to  perfume 
intoxicatingly  what  is  needed  for  her  fertilities. 

Shaw  baits  his  hook  with  laughter;  but  he  finds  this 
laughter  in  the  depths  of  thought.  In  fact,  he  told  his 
French  translator,  who  demurred  humbly  at  the  task 
imposed  upon  him,  because  he  was  not  a  humorist,  not 
even  a  college  graduate  or  much  of  an  author,  that  the 
man  who  could  make  men  think  could  make  them  laugh. 
Shaw's  laughter  is  merely  a  method  of  mining  thought 
on  deeper  levels.  The  writer  who  defined  a  gentleman 
as  a  man  who  left  humanity  in  debt  to  him,  cannot,  it 
is  certain,  be  a  mountebank.  He  is  the  most  serious 
man  of  our  time  because  he  goes  the  deepest. 

Can  Bernard  Shaw  write  a  good  play?  Shaw's  plays 
are  objected  to  by  classicists  because  they  are  not  closely 
enough  woven.  Even  Henry  James,  in  dissecting  play- 
making,  compares  it  to  the  scientific  packing  of  a  trunk, 
packed  and  unpacked  until  it  holds  its  utmost  contents. 
By  others  a  play  is  likened  to  a  piece  of  sound  ma- 
chinery, between  the  parts  of  which  you  cannot  insert  a 
knife-blade.  But  plays  can  be  so  tight  as  to  force  out 
the  human  quality.  There  must  be  room  for  atmos- 
phere between  the  lines,  or  the  personages  seem  like 
manikins. 

Play-writing  has  not  maintained  fixed  characteristics 
inherited  from  Aristotle.  The  three  unities,  time, 
place  and  action  are  gone.  Even  the  French  drama 
founded  upon  it  has  changed.     They  really  went  with 

[24] 


the  Greek  open-air  theatre  and  its  dependence  upon  the 
light  of  day.  Shakespeare  never  observed  them.  Each 
age  has  constructed  a  drama  to  please  itself;  it  has 
omitted  some  part  of  the  classica-1  recipe  and  has  made 
innovations.  The  Greek  play-goer  ordinarily  saw  three 
plays  in  a  day — a  trilogy; — a  satire,  a  comedy  and  a 
tragedy.  Our  greatest  modern  model  combines  these. 
Shakespeare  was  a  trust  magnate  who  combined  three 
plays, — comedy,  satire  and  tragedy,  in  one.  Even 
Hamlet,  as  originally  played,  would  take  now,  Ben 
Greet  tells  me,  seven  hours. 

What  is  the  sense  of  talking  about  a  play  as  if  it 
could  be  made  only  in  one  invariable  mould?  About 
every  element  in  play-writing  has  changed,  from  plot  to 
the  mechanism  of  character.  Soliloquies  and  asides  have 
disappeared  in  our  own  time,  which  shows  us  the  process. 

Architecture  has  become  free,  so  has  painting.  Why 
should  not  the  drama?  A  few  years  ago,  visitors  to  im- 
pressionist exhibitions  exclaimed:  "Whoever  saw  purple 
shadows?  Whoever  can  call  a  daub  of  crude  color, 
spotted  like  worsted  work,  a  finished  picture?  Why, 
when  I  stand  close  to  it  there  is  no  picture  at  all."  The 
painter  has  become  emancipated,  why  not  the  play- 
wright? Mr.  Shaw's  style  notifies  us  that  the  drama  is 
emancipated. 

Shaw  is  said  not  to  care  for  action.  His  critics  say 
that  "action,  action,  action"  is  the  essence  of  the  drama. 
If  this  is  so,  then  it  is  a  coincidence  that  favors  Shaw, 

[25] 


that  melodrama,  the  dramatic  form  that  entirely  dis- 
penses with  ideas  in  favor  of  action,  has  for  the  present 
come  to  the  end  of  its  popularity.  Moving  pictures,  it 
is  true,  show  action  but  as  compared  to  melodrama  they 
make  for  realism,  richness  and  thought. 

Shaw's  critics  forget,  too,  that  if  you  are  interested 
in  a  thing,  it  is  interesting.  Students  of  modern  problems 
are  interested  in  their  illumination,  and  find  it  in  graphic 
stage  delineations,  and  in  dialogue  discussions.  In  other 
words,  Mr.  Shaw's  critics  fail  to  do  justice  to  the  stim- 
ulated and  developed  mental  activity  of  democracies 
and  their  audiences,  who  "want  to  know,"  and  find  in 
the  theatre  their  answer. 

The  masses  of  the  people  in  our  freer  countries  know 
well  enough  their  salvation  lies  in  knowledge  and  will; 
in  ideas  organized  into  social,  economical  and  political 
advantages.  There  cannot  be  a  too  free  or  too  frequent 
or  too  graphic  discussion  of  ideas.  In  the  leading  democ- 
racy of  the  world — in  France — audiences  will  listen 
with  delight  to  good  dialogue  about  great  subjects  when 
there  is  no  action  at  all.  The  stage  is  democracy's  school. 

Shaw  chose  M.  Augustin  Hamon,  the  editor  of 
L'Humanite  Nouvelle,  to  be  his  French  translator,  be- 
cause, as  he  said,  after  reading  his  volume  on  Le  Social- 
ism et  le  Congres  de  London,  he  was  convinced  that  M. 
Hamon  was  the  man  to  make  a  French  translation  of 
his  comedies.  Mr.  Shaw  felt  sure  that  if  his  ideas  were 
understood  his  comedy  would  be  perceived — that  it  was 

[261 


not  a  matter  of  literature  but  life;  not  of  expression  first 
but  of  human  relationship,  freshly  expounded  through 
a  new  philosophy  of  life. 

Ideas,  ideas,  ideas,  these  are  what  the  orator  and  the 
actor  require  today  to  make  them  permanently  at- 
tractive. 

At  a  public  meeting  in  England  Mr.  Shaw  said:  "The 
future  of  the  theatres  depended  on  the  drama  of  ideas. 
There  are  three  stages  of  playgoing: 

(a)  when  the  Fairy  Queen  was  a  real  Fairy  Queen; 

(b)  when  the  actors  were  known  for  actors  and  the 
scenery  for  paint  and  canvas.  In  this  stage  the  possible 
combinations  were  soon  exhausted  and  even  the  personal 
fascinations  of  some  particular  performer  could  not 
make  it  interesting  for  long; 

(c)  when  there  was  a  permanent  attraction  which 
would  compel  adults,  who  had  grown  out  of  states  (a) 
and  (b)  to  go  on  coming  to  the  theatre,  and  would  in- 
terest the  average  respectable  man. 

These  plays  would  be  plays  that  were  'not  plays'  but 
discussions,  and  should  contain  as  little  drama  as  pos- 
sible, for  drama  was  only  another  name  for  adultery; 
and  passion  and  adultery  were  the  dullest  and  most  re- 
pugnant subjects  in  the  world.  Art  was  no  longer 
Bohemian,  and  no  longer  clandestinely  opposed  to  law 
and  custom.  The  pressure  of  social  bonds  was  so  heavy 
that  the  modern  endeavor  was  to  find  out  how  to  live 
freely  and  respectably  without  breaking  the  laws;  and 

[27] 


therein  lay  the  interest  and  value  of  the  New  Drama." 

Why  ignore  or  resist  ideas  until  they  build  Krupp  guns 
to  tear  you  to  pieces? 

Shaw  is  trying  to  turn  a  stare  into  a  thought;  horse- 
play into  the  revelation  of  our  inconsistent  hypocrisy; 
eroticism  into  the  clash  of  ideas.  He  is  a  drill-master  of 
stiff  brains,  which  he  limbers  up  by  laughter. 

Let  it  pass,  then,  you  cry  out,  that  Shaw  is  serious; 
that  he  has  as  much  right  to  his  style  of  play  as  Sopho- 
cles had  to  his.  What  do  you  say  to  his  enemies  who 
deny  him  lasting  fame  because  he  uses  passing  subjects? 

Will  Shaw's  plays  last?  This  question  involves  the 
make-up  of  comedy.  If  its  function  is  what  Meredith 
assigns:  "Nothing  less  than  the  destruction  of  old  estab- 
lished morals,"  then  it  is  bound  to  be  less  acceptable  to 
later  ages  than  our  own.  The  shock  of  the  inconsistent 
which  excites  laughter  when  the  writer  of  comedy  ex- 
coriates his  contemporaries,  is  turned  into  faint  surprise 
towards  some  historic  phase  of  social  backwardness, 
when  the  old  comedy  is  revived. 

I  am  always  disappointed  in  dramatic  revivals.  Where 
has  the  magic  of  the  old  piece  gone?  I  admire  the 
mastery  of  materials,  but  even  an  all  star  cast  cannot 
restore  the  glamor  of  a  revival.  W^it  is  perpetually 
breaking  the  shell  of  ignorance  to  present  new  life; 
but  when  at  last  you  have  the  life,  wit's  task  is  done  and 
its  voice  sounds  hollow.  So  in  old  comedy  there  is  great 
loss  from  evaporation. 

[28] 


How  much  of  Shakespeare's  fun  has  evaporated  we 
shall  never  know.  To  me  most  of  it  is  gone.  His 
horse-play  for  the  apprentice,  his  punning  (once  a  courtly 
humor),  his  social  satire  have  lost  their  meaning  and  their 
flavor.  His  chief  comic  character,  FalstafF,  is  beaten 
a  hundred  times  by  Sienkiewicz's  Zagloba. 

The  mechanical  playwright  flatters  himself  that  he  is 
dealing  with  universal  human  nature  when  he  avoids 
fads  and  contemporary  public  controversies.  But  the 
great  writers  of  comedy  have  not  satirized  human  nature 
as  if  it  were  a  stationary  thing,  but  human  nature  under 
conditions  peculiar  to  the  times,  and  living  personalities 
who  amused  them.  Aristophanes  got  his  fun  out  of 
Socrates  and  the  Sophists;  Plautus  out  of  the  life  of  his 
day,  out  of  masters  and  slaves,  etc.;  Moliere  out  of  the 
clash  of  old  and  new  and  out  of  pretentious  groups; 
Brieux  out  of  the  terrifying  new  social  enlightenment 
that  science  is  disclosing;  Shaw,  out  of  the  three-class 
system  in  England,  and  the  dilemma  of  stranded  creeds 
in  an  age  of  transition. 

Moliere's  theatre  was  the  comedy  of  contemporary 
social  satire.  He  was  as  up  to  date  in  his  shafts  as 
Gilbert,  yet  great  voices  in  his  time — for  instance — 
Corneille — denied  him  merit  except  as  a  farceur.  Liter- 
ary aff'ectation  or  theatrical  pretence,  are  no  more  a 
universal  trait  than  social,  religious,  philanthropic, 
dramatic — in  fact  all  manner  of  pretence. 

[29] 


Because  Wagner  burlesqued  the  minnesinger  is  the 
Meistersinger  less  of  a  masterpiece? 

No.  Shaw  does  not  suffer  with  posterity  because  his 
subjects  are  larger  than  the  average  English  comedy 
displays. 

Nietzsche  said  the  Germans  had  no  culture,  as  was 
shown  by  their  destitution  of  style.  For  style  and  cul- 
ture he  turned  to  the  French.  We  all  turn  to  the  French 
for  the  discovery  and  perpetuation  of  beauty.  Gallic 
approval  confers  immortality  without  the  formality  of 
election  to  Academy.  To  Byron  and  Poe,  for  instance, 
France  gave  an  international  place  and  reversed  the 
estimates  of  their  own  countrymen.  So  it  is  with  Shaw. 
He  pleases  the  French  with  his  comedy  of  ideas.  They 
love  ideas  and  lead  the  world  in  applying  them  to  life. 
They  take  ideas  seriously,  even  though  taught  by 
laughter.  The  wittiest  people  are  not  accidentally  the 
most  hospitable  to  new  thoughts,  plastic  to  its  social 
transformation  and  devoted  to  ever-changing,  beautiful 
expression — that  is,  to  style. 

The  French  stage  not  only  tolerates  but  enjoys  dis- 
cussions— living  dialogues.  But  the  living  dialogue  will 
demand  enough  action  to  carry  it,  which  will  be  as  much 
as  it  requires  to  be  absorbed. 

In  France  Shaw's  name  is  coupled  with  Moliere.  He 
is  called  the  Moliere  of  the  Twentieth  Century.  He  is 
further  assured  by  his  French  biographer  that  in  France 
the  destiny  of  his  plays  is  to  become  popular  and  classical. 

[30] 


Pour  votre  theatre,  le  destin,  c'est  de  devenir  populaire 
et  classique  en  France. 

I  have  answered  the  questions:  Is  Shaw  serious  by 
saying  yes,  as  serious  as  possible.  Can  Shaw  write 
good  plays?  Yes.  His  theatre  is  today  more  throbbing 
with  life  than  any  other. 

Does  Shaw's  election  of  contemporary  subjects  limit 
his  fame?  No.  All  the  great  writers  of  comedy  took 
contemporary  subjects  (unless  they  were  merely  adaptors 
or  translators). 

Do  his  blemishes  of  workmanship  or  of  form  hurt  him? 
Not  necessarily.  Horace  accused  Plautus  of  being 
clumsy  in  construction  and  faulty  in  the  drawing  of 
character;  yet  Plautus'  comedies  were  popular  for  genera- 
tions after  his  death  and  today  college  boys,  to  know 
their  classics,  have  to  read  him. 

Will  Shaw's  plays  last?  Yes,  because  he  has  put  one 
of  the  most  active  brains  of  our  times  to  the  portrayal 
of  the  life  of  our  time.  He  will  be  found  our  greatest 
portrait  painter  of  men  and  manners. 

After  all,  what  is  literary  immortality?  It  is  only  the 
lasting  longer  than  your  contemporaries;  it  is  not  end- 
less fame.  Civilizations  decay;  libraries  are  burned 
down;  men's  minds  find  vast  new  fields  to  feed  them  and 
new  liberties  for  which  to  struggle.  Only  a  few  great 
writers  survive  their  civilization.  Shaw  stands  a  chance 
of  such  survival  because  he  is  a  herald  of  the  new.  He 
and  Macaulay's  New  Zealander  are  already  good  friends 

[31] 


— the  one  preaches  what  the  other  will  codify  into  law. 
Possibly  it  will  be  Shaw  who  shows  the  New  Zealander 
around  London.  If  his  visit  is  long  delayed  the  New 
Zealander  may  well  make  a  pilgrimage  as  to  a  shrine  to 
the  house  of  the  man  whose  telegraphic  address  is 
Socialist,  Westrand,  London. 


3^1 


Browning's  Art  in  Monologue 

THE  most  splendid  tomb  in  the  world  is  the  Taj 
Mahal,  erected  by  a  Mogul  emperor  as  the  burial- 
place  of  his  favorite  wife.  Made  wholly  of  white 
marble,  which  in  India  retains  the  quarried  brilliancy, 
it  is  even  more  magnificent  than  Milan  cathedral  and  is 
properly  considered  the  perfection  of  Indian  Architec- 
ture. A  noble  gateway  admits  the  visitor  to  a  carriage- 
path  running  between  low,  Moorish  arched  buildings, 
at  the  end  of  which  rises  a  second  gateway  surmounted 
by  little  domes,  by  itself  beautiful  enough  to  be  a  mem- 
orable monument.  Continuing  along  a  marble  pavement 
through  tropical  foliage,  one  sees  ahead  the  dome  of  the 
Taj  resting  apparently  upon  dense  verdure.  At  length  a 
succession  of  marble  terraces  leads  to  a  platform  upon 
which  the  whole  structure  rests.  Within  the  temple, 
beneath  the  dome,  is  a  circular  marble  screen  carved  in 
delicate  tracery  and  studded  with  colored  gems.  En- 
closed by  the  screen  is  a  sarcophagus  on  which  is  cut  an 
inscription  in  Arabic.  The  name  of  the  lady  buried  here 
is  Moomtez-i-Mahal. 

It  is  not  due  only  to  the  fascination  of  the  Oriental 
picture,  I  hope,  that  in  it  I  see  a  helpful  image  of  the 
poetic  edifice  raised  by  Robert  Browning.     The  reader 

[33] 


passes  through  the  gateway  of  "Paracelsus,"  sees  a  few 
poems  on  his  way  to  the  second  gateway,  "Sordello," 
then  treads  a  path  flagged  with  dramas  and  lyrics  until 
he  reached  a  great  structure,  "The  Ring  and  the  Book," 
in  which  is  enshrined  "Pompila,"  the  poet's  loveliest  cre- 
ation. 

Browning  was  a  prolific  writer.  His  admirers  like- 
wise have  become  prolific  writers.  He  has  been  treated 
like  a  science  and  studied  in  monographs.  The  poet 
and  his  commentators  alone  have  produced  a  library, 
and  this  bulk  is  constantly  receiving  accessions.  Any 
addition  is  valuable  as  it  is  small  and  deals  with  well 
defined  sides  of  the  subject. 

So  let  us  turn  to  a  neglected  corner  and  attempt  a 
short  study  of  Browning's  art  in  monologue.  The  form 
rather  than  the  substance  of  his  poetry  will  be  our  con- 
cern; the  growth  of  the  poet's  mastery  over  his  material. 
Browning's  technique  ought  especially  to  repay  investi- 
gation because  his  style,  more  than  his  matter,  discour- 
ages readers  who  open  his  pages  for  the  first  time.  If 
they  understand  his  style  they  understand  him.  But  not 
only  is  the  style  the  man,  but  the  man  makes  the  style. 
His  temperament,  his  times,  his  topics  create  the  unique- 
ness of  his  signature.  These  we  shall  have  a  look  at  as 
well  IS  the  surface  glaze  of  his  work. 

A  20th  Century  lover  of  poetry  cannot  imagine  the 
amount  of  ridicule  heaped  upon  Browning  even  during 
the  last  and  popular  years  of  his  life, — the  number  of 

[34] 


clever  parodies  concocted  to  jeer  at  his  jolting  meter; 
the  multitude  of  jests  manufactured  to  measure  the  dark- 
ness of  his  meaning.  Even  Browning  himself  came  to 
enjoy  this  satirical  literature.  Of  these  shafts  one 
fetched  from  America  by  Louise  Chandler  Moulton  he 
received  with  uproarious  laughter.  A  Chicago  woman, 
so  ran  the  newspaper  item,  was  entering  Boston  by  rail. 
As  the  train  drew  near  the  Hub  she  heard  a  mighty 
humming.  Upon  asking  what  the  strange  noise  was,  the 
negro  Pullman  porter  informed  her,  quite  casually,  that 
the  sound  proceeded  from  the  Boston  Browning  societies, 
conning  the  meaning  of  their  master's  verse. 

A  young  man  who  came  to  his  majority  in  1833,  as 
did  Browning,  found  himself  the  citizen  of  a  new  world. 
The  end  of  the  old  Era  is  roughly  marked  by  Matthew 
Arnold  at  the  death  of  Scott  in  1832.  Then  finally  per- 
ished the  fears  of  "The  Terror" — and  likewise  the  dread, 
of  parting  with  mediaeval  views  and  institutions;  fears 
aroused  by  the  French  revolution  and  by  its  Master 
Napoleon.  These  fears  had  led  even  in  England  to  the 
persecutions  of  revolutionary  utterances,  and  to  the 
virtual  exile  of  its  great  revolutionary  voices  in  literature, 
Byron  and  Shelley.  But  by  1832  even  the  reactionary 
compact  with  Rome  (made  after  Waterloo)  by  which  her 
conservative  offices  were  sought  by  Europe  was  undone. 
The  economic  distress,  too,  that  followed  the  Treaty  of 
Vienna  had  finally  been  overcome. 

The  revolution  from  mediaeval  ideas  to  modern  is  well 
[35] 


marked  by  the  death  of  Scott.  New  conditions,  new 
problems,  new  ideas  tumbled  out  upon  England  almost  as 
suddenly  as  if  let  out  of  a  box.  The  new  industrialism 
of  steam  and  capitalism  called  even  louder  than  the 
French  peasant  voice  for  democracy  and  a  new  personal 
justice.  The  Revolution  again  broke  out  and  made  of 
the  30*3  one  of  the  most  striking  decades  in  history. 

In  1833,  the  year  of  Browning's  first  literary  venture, 
Newman  joined  the  Oxford  Movement  and  began  the 
Tracts  for  the  Times  that  fought  on  English  soil  for  dying 
Mediaevalism.  In  1836  Darwin  in  his  garden  in  Kent 
began  the  series  of  experiments  which  finally  found  ex- 
planation in  his  volume  "The  Origin  of  Species."  In 
1837  Carlyle  wrote  the  "French  Revolution"  and  brought 
a  new  philosophic  and  literary  faculty  to  bear  on  the 
problems  of  history.  In  the  same  wonderful  decade 
Macaulay,  Disraeli  and  Gladstone  were  young  men  and 
moving  forces  in  English  political  life. 

The  new  industrial  factors  of  the  Nineteenth  Century 
were  not  only  the  occasion  in  England  of  political 
reforms  but  of  new  moralities.  Factory  legislation  was 
agitated  by  the  Earl  of  Shaftesbury  in  1829.  The 
Reform  Bills  of  1832  were  the  results  of  new  industrial 
conditions  and  consequent  responsibilities. 

The  diflference  between  the  new  era  and  the  old  is  il- 
lustrated in  English  Prison  Reform.  A  man  could  be 
hung  in  England  as  late  as  181 8  for  stealing  four  shillings 
and  for  nearly   two   hundred  so-called   crimes.     From 

[36] 


1832  for  a  dozen  years  only  four  suffered  capital  punish- 
ment except  for  murder. 

The  surmise,  then,  of  a  new  scientific  attitude,  such 
as  afterwards  clarified  in  the  theory  of  evolution,  gave 
substance  to  speculation.  The  development  of  the  his- 
torical method  gave  new  importance  to  documents  and 
fact.  Philosophy  lifted  the  utilitarian  and  ethical  into 
paramount  importance. 

Browning  in  early  life  was  used  to  a  free  religious 
atmosphere.  His  parents  were  at  first  dissenters  but 
later  attended  Anglican  services.  No  religious  com- 
pulsions seem  to  have  been  put  upon  him.  The  youth 
who  read  through  Voltaire  in  his  teens,  the  admirer  of 
Shelley  (the  anarchist  expelled  from  Oxford  for  writing 
the  Necessity  of  Atheism,  the  year  before  Browning's 
birth),  the  pupil  who  made  Byron  his  poetic  model,  was 
not  likely  to  be  found  on  the  side  of  conventional  religious 
thought,  or,  for  example,  to  run  into  the  cul  de  sac  of 
sacramentalism  and  authority  that  buried  Newman. 

A  wider  divergence  could  not  easily  be  found  than  the 
thought  of  Browning  and  Newman.  Young  Newman 
brought  up  on  Calvin  and  his  dualism  of  spirit  and  matter 
ended  his  career  in  Birmingham  Oratory,  not  only  un- 
utilized by  the  church  of  his  adoption,  but  distrusted. 
The  poet  illuminated  the  relation  of  spirit  to  matter,  of 
flesh  to  soul,  in  a  brilliant  gallery  of  poetic  portraits  such 
as  had  not  been  dared  before. 

The  ladies  who  comprised  the  Browning  Societies  of 

1371 

344709 


the  last  thirty  years  did  not  realize  that  their  idol  went 
to  school  to  Voltaire,  Byron  and  Shelley.  They  prob- 
ably had  never  read  a  word  of  Voltaire  and  would  not  as 
being  the  arch-atheist;  not  much  of  Byron,  as  being  the 
arch-traitor  to  England's  morality,  and  little  of  Shelley 
as  combining  the  religious  and  ethical  improprieties  of 
both  the  others.  But  from  Browning  his  disciples  ab- 
sorbed the  teachings  of  all  the  revolutionists,  a  new 
theology  and  a  new  ethical  freedom.  This  was  Brown- 
ing's extraordinary  contribution  to  the  national  English 
interest  in  standardized  moralities. 

The  ethical  dominated  the  interests  of  Browning's 
contemporaries.  What  mattered  art  and  science  except 
as  they  helped  mankind  live?  To  contemplate,  even  to 
create  beauty,  did  not  satisfy  Browning's  generation. 
Everything  must  be  turned  to  account.  "How  to  live," 
as  Herbert  Spencer  put  it,  "that  is  the  essential  question 
for  us."  The  ethical  dominated  educational  ideals.  The 
Nineteenth  Century  was  preparing  for  the  Twentieth  Cen- 
tury efficiency.  Matthew  Arnold's  dictum  that  three- 
fourths  of  life  is  conduct,  was  preparing  for  American 
sociologist's  laudation  of  action;  "Knowledge  is  vital  only 
when  it  is  transformed  into  arterialsustenance  for  action."* 

All  the  great  Englishmen  of  the  last  century  accepted 
chairs  of  ethics,  and  agreed  from  some  point  or  other  to 
lecture  upon  conduct.  Social  philosophers  like  Spencer, 
novelists    who    moralized    like  Thackeray  and  George 

*Prof.  Small,  Journal  of  Sociology. 

[38] 


Eliot,  poets  who  preached  like  Wordsworth,  were 
representative  of  their  era.  And  of  course  Carlyle. 
There  is  a  look  of  the  wrinkled  brow,  of  the  problem 
unsolved,  of  the  burden  increasing,  in  short,  of  moral 
responsibility,  about  the  mighty  men  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  which  cannot  be  paralleled  in  the  two  previous 
centuries.  To  this  troubled  aspect  Browning  was  an 
exception.  He  saw  more  clearly,  he  led  a  broader  life, 
more  international,  more  social,  more  sane;  yet  he  too 
was  a  preacher. 

The  new  era  into  which  Browning  was  born  had  an- 
other characteristic  which  the  date  of  Scott's  death 
marks  with  personal  emphasis;  it  went  over  from  poetry 
to  fiction,  just  as  Scott  himself  did,  as  its  preferred  and 
popular  literary  form.  Browning  shows,  as  does  no 
other  Nineteenth  Century  poet,  the  effect  of  competing 
fiction.  He  met  prose  competition  by  modifying  poetry. 
He  labored  to  give  his  lines  animation  and  vivacity,  quite 
after  the  conversational  method  of  the  novel.  The 
preacher's  habits  and  prose  writer's  tricks  he  utilized. 
He  brought  over  the  animation  of  prose  fiction  into 
poetry  to  meet  the  demand  for  greater  conversational 
intimacy  between  the  author  and  the  reader.  You 
can  feel  too  as  you  read  him  the  pounding  of  the  pulpit 
to  wake  up  the  drowsy. 

In  a  generation  that  so  largely  cast  off  poetry  in  favor 
of  prose  fiction;  in  the  reign,  in  fact,  of  Dickens  and 
Thackeray,  Browning  still  was  devoted   to  the  Muses. 

[39] 


But  he  brought  to  their  service  a  new  audacity  of  atti- 
tude— a  new  boldness  of  the  eye;  a  self-conscious,  even 
egotistical  technique  coupled  with  more  daring  moraliza- 
tion  than  had  yet  appeared  in  English  verse.  He  bor- 
rowed from  prose  a  new  realism  and  ad  hominem  ad- 
dress; he  freed  poetic  beauty  from  prettiness  and  used 
imagination  for  deeper  human  analysis.  He  responded 
markedly  to  those  demands  which  produced  modern 
prose  fiction. 

Another  interesting  light  upon  Browning's  style  is 
afforded  by  the  special  form  he  selected.  In  the  thirties 
soliloquy,  although  in  Victor  Hugo's  dramas  it  had  been 
carried  far,  was  in  a  way  to  be  dropped  and  later  was 
dropped  from  dramatic  devices.  Browning  picked  up 
this  discarded  stage  ornament  and  made  it  the  "Captain 
jewel  of  his  carcanet."  Byron  already  had  made  a  hit 
with  the  "Prisoner  of  Chillon"  and  "Mazeppa"  by  means 
of  the  directness,  force  and  clearness  of  monologue. 
In  this  mould  of  the  monologue  Browning  casts  his  im- 
portant work.  It  was  the  basis  of  his  style  and  estab- 
lished its  personal  conversational  note;  it  was  the  unit  of 
his  art  by 'which  all  that  he  did  can  be  measured. 

Browning's  place  among  English  poets  is  not  marked 
by  what  some  critics  consider  unaccountable  personal 
peculiarities  of  workmanship.  He  was  an  orderly  ap- 
pearance in  English  letters.  An  English  poet's  Almanac 
for  1829  could  have  prognosticated  such  a  career.  By 
taking  into  consideration  the  course  of  English  verse,  and 

[40] 


by  understanding  the  intellectual  content  of  the  period, 
it  could  have  printed:  "At  this  time  look  out  for  Robert 
Browning." 

I  have  never  seen  Browning's  relation  to  the  literary 
movement  of  his  time  carefully  studied,  nor  his  debt 
to  his  predecessors  in  England,  Byron  and  Shelley,  and 
to  Hugo  his  contemporary  in  France,  followed  up,  nor 
his  place  in   English  versification   traced. 

English  verse  may  be  said  to  start  for  modern  readers 
with  the  Elizabethans  and  to  have  two  main  directions. 
One  of  these  followed  the  Greek  and  Latin  epics  and  their 
Italian  imitations,  but  exchanged  the  classical  hexameter 
for  the  ten-syllable  line  and  thus  created  the  blank  verse 
of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists  and  Milton.  The  other 
copied  Italian  stanzas  and  produced  the  English  sonnet, 
ottava  rima  and  the  Spenserian  stanzas. 

The  single  blank  verse  of  five  feet  ending  with  the 
line,  soon  gave  place  to  a  more  pliable  unit  of  versifica- 
tion— a  sentence  composed  of  several  such  verses  or 
parts  of  verses,  balanced  and  cadenced,  but  without 
rhyme.  This  lengthening  of  the  run  of  the  single  line 
afforded  flexibility  and  room  for  even  Miltonic  melody; 
but  in  heavy  hands  became  clumsy  and  tedious.  So 
English  poetry  tried  next  for  pithiness  and  neatness, 
and  found  these  qualities  in  the  couplets  of  Dryden  and 
Pope,  which  speedily  superseded  blank  verse.  But 
after  a  century  of  heroic  couplets,  this  polished  form 
seemed  too  mechanical  and  superficial  for  the  taste  of 

[41] 


the  revolutionary  decade  of  the  Eighteenth  Century 
which  returned  to  simpler  expression  and  again  to  blank 
verse,  but  of  a  sort  that  lacked  Elizabethan  and  Milton- 
ian  grandeur,  and  wanting,  too,  their  interior  melodies, 
ran  monotonously  into  interminable  narrative,  as  in 
Wordsworth's  Task  and  the  Excursion. 

The  second  development  of  Elizabethan  verse  is  more 
Italian  than  classical.  The  Italian  sonnet  became  a 
familiar  and  honored  English  form.  Italian  stanzas  are 
used  by  Spenser,  Byron,  Keats  and  Shelley,  but  with 
little  expansion  of  their  metrical  possibilities.  Swin- 
burne was  the  great  experimenter  and  perfecter  of  our 
more  intricate  and  sumptuous  Italian  tradition  which,  in 
his  time,  became  enriched  with  French  forms  and  ani- 
mated by  French  esprit,  while  astonishingly  expanded  by 
a  glorious  inspiration  from  Greek  dramatic  choruses. 

Nineteenth  Century  English  poetry,  it  then  appears, 
has  contributed  two  highly  developed  studies  in  the  two 
directions  characteristic  of  our  poetry — the  narrative  and 
the  lyric;  the  Latin  tradition  and  the  Italian  tradition. 
The  technical  story  of  Victorian  verse  could  omit  every 
other  name  except  Browning  and  Swinburne  and  yet  be 
complete.  Tennyson,  Arnold,  Longfellow  added  noth- 
ing novel  to  English  Prosody. 

Browning  was  the  inventor  of  a  new  dash  and  freshness 
in  blank  verse.  At  first  he  used  the  same  ambling, 
contemplative  lines  as  his  contemporaries  until  criticism 
and  experience  led  him  to  desire  terseness  and  color. 

[42] 


Instead  of  repeating  the  Seventeenth  Century  solution  for 
this  problem  and  using  couplets,  he  tried  to  preserve  the 
flow  and  naturalness  of  unrhymed  long  lines,  but  to 
secure  the  desired  compactness  by  a  conversational  style, 
by  omissions,  which  took  much  for  granted  and  so  left 
much  unsaid;  in  short,  by  explosive  and  abrupt  rhetorical 
figures  that  eflFected  his  purpose,  but  unfortunately,  ren- 
dered him  difficult  to  understand.  He  also  used  ex- 
traordinary rhymes.  I  repeat.  Browning  is  a  more 
significant  figure  in  the  History  of  English  poetry  than 
any  of  his  contemporaries  except  Swinburne.  His  style 
is  not  a  sport  on  the  flourishing  tree  of  English  poetry, 
it  is  a  branch. 

As  a  literary  craftsman,  then.  Browning  did  several 
interesting  things.  He  pulled  English  blank  verse  out 
of  the  contemplative,  descriptive,  quiet  ruts  of  the 
Eighteenth  Century.  He  brought  into  poetry  the  modern 
habit  of  personal  comment  and  made  an  habitual  man- 
ner of  Byron's  frequent  pose.  Finally,  Browning  picked 
out  a  tid-bit,  monologue,  from  the  old  drama  and  made 
that  the  pitce  de  resistance  of  his  art. 

Many  of  the  spiritual  benefactors  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century — Thackeray,  Dickens, Newman,  Carlyle,  George 
Eliot,  Charles  Kingsley,  Emerson — had  a  talent  for 
verse  that  under  Good  Queen  Bess  might  have  blossomed 
and  become  their  sufficient  medium.  But  they  believed 
that  they  could,  on  the  whole,  best  help  their  time  by 
addressing  it  in  prose.     Browning  settled  the  question 

[43] 


differently.     He  understood  his  day  and  generation,  but 
in  his  constitution  imagination  and  reason  were  both  so 
strong  that  his  thought  expressed  itself  best  in  ornate 
art.     He  is  well  aware  of  the  difficulties  in  his  way,  and 
he  offers  arguments  for  his  choice. 
"Why  take  the  artistic  way  to  prove  so  much? 
Because  it  is  the  glory  and  good  of  Art 
That  Art  remains  the  one  way  possible 
Of  speaking  truth,  to  mouths  like  mine,  at  least." 
In  days,  too,  when  the  largest  financial  return  from 
the  pen  went  to  novelists,  whose  profits  per  volume  are 
proud  items   in   their   biographies,   Browning  ventured 
boldly  upon  a  career  in  which  to  the  end  he  was  to  lose 
money.     He  ran  counter  to  his  time  and  to  its  habit 
of  commercial  valuations.    He  plied  the  poet's  trade  in 
a  hard  market. 

The  modern  poet  has  a  labor  which  the  Greek  poets 
were  unburdened  by.  If  the  final  object  of  poetry,  in 
our  deepest  use  of  it,  is  the  cleansing  and  lifting  of  the 
soul  ("Only  that  is  poetry,"  says  Emerson,  "which 
cleanses  and  mans  me"),  then  the  poet  must  eke  out  the 
spiritual  inertia  of  his  audience,  and  attach  to  his  reve- 
lation of  beauty  an  index-finger  pointing  to  the  ab- 
solute. In  short,  he  must  interpret  beauty  in  easy 
ethical  terms.  A  modern  artist  has  to  affix  a  tag  to  his 
work  to  explain  it.  An  example  is  Keats*  "Ode  on  a 
Grecian  Urn."  Four  stanzas  of  the  ode  reproduce  the 
beauty  of  the  exquisite  shape,  and  it  has  rarely  hap- 

[44] 


pened  that  one  art  has  been  so  magically  transcribed 
into  the  symbols  of  another.  Finally,  as  though  he 
heard  the  age  saying,  "Yes,  very  beautiful,  but  what 
of  it?"  he  writes  a  fifth  stanza  and  thus  attaches  a  card 
to  the  urn  to  announce  the  moral  truth  contained  in  the 
beautiful  form: 

"Thou  shalt  remain  in  midst  of  other  woe 
That  ours,  a  friend  to  man,  to  whom  thou  sayst 
'Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty,'  that  is  all 
Ye  know  on  earth,  and  all  ye  need  to  know." 

A  modern  poet  who  represents  his  age,  cannot  be 
classic  in  the  Greek  sense,  he  cannot  present  truth  free 
from  the  accidental;  he  must  be  ornate,  overlaying  the 
truth  to  be  revealed  with  analogies  and  suggestive  com- 
ments. Such  characteristics  in  our  art  are  encouraged, 
too,  by  the  greater  complexity  of  modern  ideas  and  life. 
Our  artist  is  half  preacher,  he  objectifies  a  truth  then 
dogmatizes  it.  He  does  something  and  explains  what 
he  has  done  all  in  one  work.  How  this  second  or  ex- 
planatory function  is  to  be  added  to  the  first  or  the 
universal,  is  the  problem  of  our  art.  This  was  Browning's 
problem,  his  answer  was  necessarily  a  composite  art. 
You  feel  about  it  as  you  do  when  the  mystic  lines  of  a 
Gothic  Cathedral  are  interrupted  by  a  carved  animal 
form — the  eruption  violently  of  ideas  and  propagandas 
frankly  into  the  realm  of  pure  art. 

Browning  treated  19th  Century  theology  in  mono- 
logue.     Milton   discussed    17th   Century    theology   and 

[45] 


problems  of  government  in  epic  poems.  The  monologue 
was  probably  derived  from  the  messenger  speeches  of 
the  Greek  drama  and  has  its  own  modern  history,  but 
it  was  developed  by  Browning  into  a  form  with  a  distinct 
range,  like  the  epic,  the  drama  or  the  lyric.  Although 
Browning  has  written  plays  in  which  he  has  been  truer 
to  classic  definitions  than  most  English  poets,  they  were 
not,  in  their  formal  requirements,  congenial  to  his 
genius.  The  19th  Century  poet,  as  has  been  seen,  had 
to  give  a  running  commentary  on  the  truth  his  verse 
embodies.  He  had  to  over  illustrate  his  fact  to  make  it 
clear  to  minds  not  so  severely  trained  to  beauty  as  the 
Greek.  In  modern  or  ancient  drama,  since  the  main 
interest  is  in  the  action,  any  commentary  or  ornament 
obscures  the  movement  of  the  plot.  Even  in  Shake- 
speare— a  profusion  of  imagery  hinders  the  progress  of 
events.  The  drama,  on  this  account,  was  not  the  best 
medium  for  Browning.  His  monologues  are  often  so 
dramatic  in  expression  that  they  persuade  the  reader 
he  is  in  the  hands  of  a  born  dramatist,  but  upon  investi- 
gation, the  speaker  in  the  poem  is  always  found  to  be 
Browning  under  different  names,  and  the  quality  of  the 
verse  to  be  not  dramatic  but  contemplative  and  didactic. 
Browning  experimented  to  find  a  form  of  poetry  in 
which  action  and  description  would  exist  most  happily 
side  by  side.  His  work  as  an  artist  has  been  to  discover 
and  develop  the  possibilities  in  monologue.  Examined 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  monologue,  all  that  he  has 

[46] 


I 


done  discloses  unity.  In  "Paracelsus"  and  "Sordello" 
he  was  experimenting  with  his  materials.  In  "The  Ring 
and  the  Book"  he  mastered  them.  The  steps  in  Brown- 
ing's art  can  be  easily  traced  in  these  three  poems. 

Quite  in  the  spirit  of  Browning,  I  attach,  perhaps, 
undue  importance  to  my  figure  of  the  Taj  with  its  two 
gateways.  Still,  we  may  as  well  keep  it  in  mind  while 
we  examine  the  poet's  masterpiece  where  Pompilia 
rests,  and  the  two  earlier  poems,  in  workmanship  tenta- 
tive and  introductory — Paracelsus  and  Sordello.  Yet 
after  asking  you  to  accept  my  image  I  must  risk  marring 
it,  for  "Paracelsus"  is  not  Browning's  first  poem,  nor 
is  it  to  the  eye  a  monologue.  However,  no  harm  is  done 
to  our  first  gateway,  at  most  it  is  given  a  double  arch. 

"Pauline,"  the  first  weak  child  of  our  poet's  Muse, 
was  exposed  upon  the  barren  hillside  of  public  neglect. 
It  was  rescued  and  deposited  in  the  British  Museum. 
An  accident — an  American  writer's  discovery  of  the 
volume — compelled  its  author,  late  in  life,  to  acknowl- 
edge it. 

"Paracelsus,"  which  takes  pretty  much  the  same  sub- 
ject, is  counted  as  his  first  work  by  the  poet,  and  is 
accepted  as  such  by  the  public.  I  must  acknowledge 
that  while  a  page  of  "Paracelsus"  looks  like  a  dialogue 
it  is  not.  There  are  a  number  of  speakers — Festus, 
Aprile,  Michal — who  give  their  Master  an  occasional 
breathing-space,  or  jog  his  memory.  So  when  we  start 
upon    a   study   of  Browning's   art   in    monologue   with 

[47] 


"Paracelsus,"  we  are  probably  doing  what  the  author 
would  wish.  Still,  a  few  points  in  the  style  of  both 
poems  are  more  easily  studied  in  the  earlier  one,  where 
a  less  finished  art  fails  to  hide  the  mechanism. 

"Pauline",  a  fragment  of  a  confession,  is  a  monologue 
of  about  a  thousand  lines  in  blank  verse.  The  speaker, 
at  the  point  of  death  and  presumably  young,  talks  to 
Pauline,  the  woman  he  loves.  He  reviews  his  life,  dis- 
cusses points  in  his  development,  and  the  causes  of  his 
mistakes.  The  trouble  seems  to  be  that  he  has  been 
pulled  in  opposite  directions. 

"I  would  have  one  joy 
But  one  in  life,  so  it  were  wholly  mine, 
One  rapture  all  my  soul  could  fill." 

On  the  other  hand,  wisdom  attracts  him. 

"This  restlessness  of  passion  meets  in  me 

A  craving  after  knowledge  *  ♦  ♦ 

The  sleepless  harpy  with  just  budding  wings." 

His  passion  is  a  variation  of  the  choice  of  Hercules, 
Venus  contending  with  Minerva  for  the  possession  of  a 
soul.  He  vacillates,  and  in  his  weakness  secures  the 
help  of  neither  goddess.  We  encounter  him  sick,  re- 
cumbent, talking  to  Pauline.  The  picture  might  as  well 
be  Fanny  Brawne  come  to  the  lonely  room  in  Rome  where 
Keats  lay  in  his  fatal  illness.  At  last,  she  listens  and 
perhaps  weeps,  as  the  poet  tells  over  the  short  bead-roll 

[48] 


of  his  years,  and  for  the  last  time  pours  out  his  soul  to  a 
woman. 

The  influence  of  Keats,  indeed,  is  plainly  perceptible 
in  "Pauline";  but  there  is  also  an  intellectual  element, 
a  disposition  to  weigh  the  value  of  things  wholly  alien 
to  Keats.  The  thoughtful  vein  in  the  poem  reminds 
one  of  Shelley,  and  "Alastor"  both  in  form  and  spirit 
may  easily  have  been  the  father  of  Browning's  first  poetic 
child.  Browning  admired  Shelley  most  of  modern 
poets,  and  the  following  lines  in  the  poem  we  are  exam- 
ining no  doubt  refer  to  him: — 

"And  my  choice  fell 
Not  so  much  on  a  system  as  a  man — 
One  whom  praise  of  mind  shall  not  offend. 
Who  was  as  calm  as  beauty,  being  such 
Unto  mankind  as  thou  to  me,  Pauline." 

Although  life  has  perplexed  Pauline's  lover,  and  he 

has  not  known  which  to  choose,  beauty  or  knowledge,  at 

last,  by  the  light  of  love,  he  sees  more  clearly, — 

"For  I  ♦  *  * 

Shall  doubt  not  many  another  bliss  awaits. 
***** 

As  I  again  go  o'er  the  tracts  of  thought 
***** 

And  beauteous  shapes  will  come  for  me  to  seize. 
And  unknown  secrets  shall  be  trusted  me 
Which  were  denied  the  waverer." 

[49] 


In  "Pauline,"  Browning  is  not  as  yet  self-centered; 
there  are  too  many  evidences  of  contemporary  influence; 
he  is  struggling  toward  maturity  and  independence,  but 
does  not  reach  his  poetic  majority  until  "Paracelsus." 
The  scene  of  "the  confession"  he  neglects  to  fix,  which 
shows  how  early  in  his  career  he  despised  what  did  not 
to  his  mind  help  the  reader's  study  of  a  soul — a  vague- 
ness easily  forgiven  a  young  admirer  of  Shelley.  The 
opening  lines,  however,  disclose  the  double  poetic  alle- 
giance, for  they  are  quite  in  the  style  of  Keats: — 

"Pauline,  mine  own,  bend  o'er  me — thy  soft  breast 
Shall  pant  to  mine — bend  o'er  me — thy  sweet  eyes 
And  loosened  hair,"  etc. 

But  the  glow  of  sensuousness  in  the  beginning  of  the 
poem  soon  pales  away  into  cold,  intellectual  talk  about 
beauty  and  knowledge. 

Browning  was  aware  of  his  tendency  toward  cold 
monotony,  and  tried  to  lighten  the  reader's  burden  by 
introducing  two  episodes;  one  a  description  of  Andromeda 
and  the  dragon;  the  other  a  picture  of  an  ideal  abode  for 
lovers,  like  Claude  Melnott's  improvisation.  To  help 
the  verse  bear  off  more  trippingly  a  subject  that  inclined 
to  meditative  slowness,  he  interjected  frequent  epigrams. 
More  lines  in  "Pauline"  look  as  if  framed  to  be  quoted 
than  in  all  the  rest  of  Browning's  poetry.  Most  of  these 
ornaments  are  short,  a  line  or  two,  I  will  venture  to  quote 

[50] 


one  rather  longer  than  the  rest.     Autumn  stands  before 
us  as  she  might  look  in  a  painting  by  Rossetti. 

"Autumn  has  come  like  spring  returned  to  us, 
Won  from  her  girlishness,  like  one  returned 
A  friend  that  was  a  lover,  nor  forgets 
The  first  warm  love,  but  full  of  sober  thoughts 
Of  fading  years,  whose  soft  mouth  quivers  yet 
With   the  old  smile,  but  yet  so  changed   and  still!" 

In  the  later  works  there  is  almost  an  entire  absence 
of  passages  that  lend  themselves  readily  to  quotation. 
A  good  thought  or  a  happy  analogy  is  left  to  take  care  of 
itself,  and  is  not  helped  by  roundness  of  period  or  gram- 
matical construction,  to  stand  out  brighter  than  its  fel- 
lows. The  choicest  passages  in  Browning  begin  and  end 
anywhere  in  a  line,  and  fall  in  any  person,  number  or 
tense.  Instead  of  being  easily  detached  they  are  em- 
bedded well-nigh  inextricably  in  the  whole.  Browning  is  a 
hard  poet  for  calendar  makers.  But  we  must  turn  to 
the  second  arch  of  our  first  gateway. 

"Paracelsus"  consists  of  some  four  thousand  lines  of 
blank- verse,  broken  by  a  number  of  songs.  In  form  a 
dialogue  between  Paracelsus,  Festus,  Aprile,  and  Michal, 
it  is  really  a  monologue.     Says  the  author: 

"It  is  an  attempt,  probably  more  novel  than  happy, 
to  reverse  the  method  usually  adopted  by  writers  whose 
aim  it  is  to  set  forth  any  phenomena  of  the  mind  or  the 
passions  by  the  operation  of  persons  and  events,  and  that 

[51] 


instead  of  having  recourse  to  an  external  machinery  of 
incidents  to  create  and  evolve  the  crisis  I  desire  to  pro- 
duce, I  have  ventured  to  display  somewhat  intimately 
the  mood  itself  in  its  rise  and  progress,  and  have  suf- 
fered the  agency  by  which  it  is  influenced  and  determined 
to  be  generally  discernible  in  its  effects  alone,  and  sub- 
ordinate throughout,  if  not  altogether  excluded,  and  this 
for  a  reason.  I  have  endeavored  to  write  a  poem,  not  a 
drama." 

The  poem  opens  in  the  year  1512  a.d.  From  that  date 
onward,  the  friends  meet  four  or  five  times  before  the 
close  of  the  half  century,  and  on  these  occasions,  Para- 
celsus narrates  what  has  befallen  him.  These  mono- 
logues, with  occasional  interruptions  from  the  others> 
constitute  the  scenes. 

Paracelsus  is  ambitious  to  grasp  all  knowledge  and 
to  glorify  God  by  shining  upon  men  like  a  star  of  wisdom. 
Every  pleasure,  every  reward  of  praise  or  of  love,  he 
pushes  aside,  his  goal  alone  can  attract  him.  He 
despises  praise  and  lets  men  see  that  he  can  do  without 
it.  They  in  turn  hate  him.  When  he  laughs  at  their 
enmity,  they  denounce  him. 

But  they  were  right  and  he  was  wrong.  He  thought 
them  contemptible  creatures  only  because  he  had  no  real 
sympathy  for  them.  When  they,  deaf  to  his  cold, 
loveless  visions,  forsake  him,  he  stoops  to  conquer,  and 
exchanges  for  the  persuasions  of  wisdom  the  terrors  of 
magic.     The  populace  sees  through  his  tricks,  resents  his 

[52] 


appeal  to  their  passions  and  superstitions,  then  thrusts 
him  out — a  discredited  charlatan. 

Paracelsus  learned  that  knowledge,  to  influence  his 
fellow  men,  must  go  hand  in  hand  with  love.  He  learned 
too  that  a  soul  must  follow  its  own  enlightenment,  and, 
whether  it  win  or  lose  must  not  turn  to  the  dark  gods  of 
force  or  fraud.  Aprile,  a  poet,  represents  the  voice  of 
love,  which  throughout  life  called  constantly  to  Paracel- 
sus, but  to  which  he  was  deaf.  Festus  stands  for  faith 
in  Paracelsus,  but  Paracelsus  lost  faith  in  himself.  At 
last,  however,  he  sees  what  a  mistake  has  been  made,  and 
with  his  last  breath  whispers: 

"Festus,  let  my  hand 
This  hand,  lie  in  your  own,  my  own  true  friend! 
Aprile!  hand  in  hand  with  you,  Aprile! 
Festus.     And  this  was  Paracelsus." 

The  author  did  right  to  define  a  work  as  a  poem  which 
on  the  outside  looked  like  a  drama.  "Paracelsus"  can- 
not be  acted  because  it  has  no  action.  Its  force  is  best 
felt  in  reading,  but  it  is  hard  reading.  No  one  knows 
whether  the  experience  of  Paracelsus  represents  the  soul's 
growth  aright  until  he  himself  has  passed  through 
similar  experiences.  To  one  who  has  passed  through 
like  crises,  the  poem  is  a  twice-told  tale,  he  knows  the 
story  and  its  lesson.  To  one  who  has  not  lived  such  a 
life,  the  crises  are  either  barely  intelligible — that  is, 
as  necessary  steps  in  a  soul's  development — or  in  com- 

[53] 


parison  with  action,  they  are  but  mildly  interesting. 
The  wisdom  of  the  whole  could  be  contained  in  half  a 
dozen  sonnets,  and  in  that  form  would  stand  a  much 
better  chance  than  at  present  of  becoming  widely  known. 
Throughout  a  poem  as  long  as  all  of  the  Ovid,  we  used  to 
read  for  college,  it  is  a  labor  to  keep  in  mind  the  in- 
termediate steps  of  progress  from  knowing  to  loving — a 
capital  sonnet-sequence. 

There  is  no  personal  attraction  about  any  of  the 
characters.  Aprile  comes  in  with  a  catching  verse;  but 
he  is  too  much  of  an  abstraction  to  interest  us.  The  in- 
tangible substance  of  the  poem,  points  to  the  radical 
defect  in  a  species  of  verse  that  describes  the  soul  without 
reference  to  the  body.  It  is  neither  objective  nor  sub- 
jective. Held  up  to  nature  it  is  monstrous  egotism. 
Suppose  Browning  were  wrong  about  Paracelsus,  or 
better,  that  a  soul  does  not  have  to  develop  in  the  way 
his  hero  does,  then  we  are  left  with  nothing — neither 
the  living,  acting  person  of  the  drama,  whose  character 
gooid  or  bad,  we  unravel  from  his  deeds,  nor  the  sub- 
jective experience  of  Browning  himself  when  on  some 
occasion  he  has  received  a  powerful  emotion. 

Besides  its  too  great  length  and  its  shadowy  characters, 
little  more  than  personifications,  there  is  another  fault 
in  "Paracelsus,"  the  same  we  saw  in  "Pauline" — lack  of 
warmth  and  of  movement.  Towards  the  end  of  the 
poem,  there  is  a  need  of  cumulative  effect,  but  no  action 
is  to  be  got  out  of  such  shades  as  Paracelsus  and  Festus. 

[54] 


The  poet,  therefore,  permits  Paracelsus,  when  somewhat 
delirious,  to  describe  the  doings  of  his  uncontrolled  brain. 
The  result  is  striking  but  weak  and  out  of  keeping  with 
the  rest. 

A  few  songs  break  the  monotony  of  this  long  poem, 
and  had  Browning  done  nothing  else,  they  would  give 
him  a  place  in  English  anthology.  Browning's  verse  is 
supposed  to  be  rough  and  ragged,  even  if  like  the  weapon 
of  Zeus,  it  be  powerful.  The  following  lines  breathe  the 
sweetness  of  the  Elizabethan  lyrics: 

"Heap  cassia,  sandal-buds  and  stripes 

Of  labdanum  and  aloe-balls, 
Smeared  with  dull  nard  an  Indian  wipes 

From  out  her  hair,  such  balsam  falls 

Down  seaside  mountain  pedestals, 
From  tree- tops  where  tired  winds  are  fain. 
Spent  with  the  vast  and  howling  main. 
To  treasure  half  their  island-gain. 

"And  strew  faint  sweetness  from  some  old 
Egyptian's  fine  worm-eaten  shroud 
Which  breaks  to  dust  when  once  unrolled, 
Or  shredded  perfume  like  a  cloud 
From  closet  long  to  quiet  vowed. 
With  mothed  and  dropping  arras  hung. 
Mouldering  her  lute  and  books  among 
As  when  a  queen,  long  dead,  was  young." 

[55] 


The  second  gateway  in  our  approach  to  Browning's 
masterpiece  is  "Sordello,"  an  historical  poem  of  about  six 
thousand  lines,  in  five-measure  iambic  feet  with  couplet 
rhymes.  In  a  thirteenth  century  troubadour.  Browning 
found  a  type  of  the  artist  who,  with  great  natural  gifts 
and  the  ambition  to  put  knowledge  as  well  as  emotion 
into  his  work,  is  confused  by  the  events  of  life,  and 
dies  without  accomplishment. 

The  early  sensuousness  of  Sordello  turns  into  serious- 
ness, and  his  audience  deserts  him.  He  is  not  self- 
centered  enough  to  work  out  for  himself  a  form  of  self 
expression  in  spite  of  circumstances,  but  he  is  controlled 
by  the  environment  of  his  age.  The  Guelf  and  Ghibelline 
wars  are  transforming  Italian  cities  into  shambles. 
Sordello  is  stirred  to  action  by  his  keen  sympathy  with 
the  people,  and  espouses  their  side,  but  he  loses  his  own 
identity  when  he  exchanges  the  pen  for  the  sword. 
His  power  is  dissipated,  and  his  slight  accomplishment 
amounts  to  failure. 

Although  incapable  of  successful  action,  his  will  is 
unshaken.  When  he  discovers  himself  to  be  the  son  of 
Salinguerra,  the  most  famous  Ghibelline  soldier,  he 
refuses  to  accept  the  imperial  badge  which  to  him  meant 
(wrongly,  perhaps)  desertion  of  the  people,  but  trampled 
it  under  foot  and  in  the  act  dies. 

Sordello  is  psychological  cousin-german  to  Pauline's 
lover,  and  his  "story"  as  a  narrative  of  events  is  upon  a 

[  56] 


first    reading    unintelligible.     Carlyle    said    there    were 
only  two  lines  in  it  he  could  understand,  the  first: 

"Who  will  may  hear  Sordello's  story  told"; 
and  the  last, 

"Who    would    has    heard    Sordello's    story    told." 

Even  a  friendly  hand  is  compelled  to  write:  "It  is 
one  of  the  most  incomprehensible  in  all  literature." 
A  minute  knowledge  of  a  most  difficult  piece  of  history 
— that  of  the  Italian  cities  in  the  later  Middle  Ages — is 
presumed.  But  a  scholarly  reader  would  be  perplexed 
by  the  confusion  of  fictitious  with  historical  characters, 
and  he  would  share  the  misery  of  an  unlearned  reader  in 
being  utterly  unable  to  follow  the  thread  of  the  story. 
The  narrative  goes  backward  and  forward  weaving  a 
wellnigh  inextricable  web.  Fortunately,  a  clue  to 
Sordello  has  been  furnished  by  a  friendly  hand  in  plain 
prose  by  which  a  patient  reader  may  find  his  way. 

When  Browning  set  about  Sordello  he  had  learned 
that  monologue — the  recitation  of  an  event  by  the  author 
— was  tiresome.  Even  given  the  specious  appearance  of 
dialogue,  as  in  Paracelsus,  the  effect  was  the  same. 
He  somewhat  changed  the  mode  in  Sordello,  which  is  a 
monologue  delivered  in  the  third  person.  The  qualities 
of  the  verse  were  the  same,  and  the  ideas  to  be  brought 
out  were  the  same  as  in  Browning's  previous  work. 
"The  historical  decoration  was  purposely  of  no  more 
importance  than  a  background  requires,  and  my  stress 

[57] 


lay  on  the  incidents  in  the  development  of  a  soul." 
The  only  new  factors  in  this  story  are  mechanical 
ones. 

In  Paracelsus  I  called  attention  to  a  method  by 
which  Browning  gave  the  closing  scene  in  Paracelsus  a 
good  deal  of  life.  The  device  was  to  have  Paracelsus 
describe  a  dream.  A  description  of  an  event  by  a  third 
person  has  advantages;  it  can  tell  us  about  passive  people^ 
yet  put  action  into  the  recital.  If,  on  the  contrary,  in- 
active people  were  allowed  to  work  out  their  own  lives^ 
or  were  set  to  describing  their  lives,  which  in  performance, 
have  been  typical  failures,  no  action  could  be  expected* 
Had  anyone  else  written  Sordello  I  should  call  it  a  narra- 
tive poem.  Since  the  poem  in  Browning's  hands  seems 
to  be  a  new  study  in  the  development  of  monologue,  I 
had  rather  think  of  it  as  a  monologue  in  the  third 
person. 

The  qualities  that  Browning  wished  to  give  the  verse 
he  succeeded  in  giving  it.  The  poem  has  brilliancy  and 
in  parts  action,  in  spite  of  the  historical  tangle  which 
makes  Sordello  hard  reading.  For  in  movement  Sordello 
resembles  a  man  in  pantomime,  who,  going  through  all 
the  motions  necessary  for  a  vigorous  progress,  gains  no 
ground  and  only  signals  the  distance.  The  means  by 
which  he  rescued  his  story  from  being  wearisome,  how- 
ever, is  not  the  most  important  discovery  that  Browning 
shows  us  in  Sordello,  for  he  uses  monologue  in  the  third 
person  very  rarely  afterwards.    The  great  discovery  the 

[58] 


poet  made,  which  must  have  rejoiced  him  as  Cortez 
rejoiced: 

"When  with  eagle  eyes 
He  stared  at  the  Pacific  .  .  ." 

was  Italy  which  he  beheld  from  the  Alpine  heights  of 
his  former  flight.  Browning's  theological  mind  expressed 
in  monologue,  had  a  tendency  to  syllogistic  nakedness. 
His  lofty  thought  was  as  cold  as  the  spaces  are  said  to 
be  between  the  stars.  In  Italy  he  found  not  only  a  gor- 
geous background  for  his  ideas,  but  men  and  women 
of  rich  natures  to  express  his  views  of  life.  I  cannot 
conceive  what  he  would  have  become  as  a  literary 
workman,  had  he  not  made  the  discovery  to  which  I 
call  attention. 

More  metaphysical  and  more  learned  than  any  poet 
of  the  century,  many  dangers  lay  in  Browning's  way. 
A  keener  observer  but  with  less  fancy  than  Shelley,  his 
philosophy  must  have  found  another  means  of  expression 
from  that  displayed  by  his  predecessor's  bewildering 
Muse.  Without  a  disposition  to  repose  in  simple  nature 
like  Wordsworth  he  could  not  have  followed  along  the 
path  of  the  "Excursion."  Unprofitable  as  it  may  be  to 
discuss  such  hypothetical  questions,  it  was  Italy,  as  far 
as  I  can  see,  that  saved  to  us  Robert  Browning,  the 
poet.  Otherwise,  his  learning  and  his  complex  knowl- 
edge of  the  soul  must  have  produced  the  most  pedantic 
and  mystic  verse  imaginable.     Such  a  catastrophe,  for- 

[59] 


tunately,  we  have  been  spared,  and  in  view  of  what  the 
discovery  of  Italy  was  to  Browning  and  to  English 
poetry,  an  admirer  is  tempted  to  see  a  poetic  justice  in 
the  fact  that  in  Italy  Mrs.  Browning  is  buried,  and  that 
in  Italy  the  poet  himself  breathed  his  last. 

When  once  his  Muse  had  found  that  sunny  land,  she 
rarely  left  it.  The  scenes  of  his  greatest  works  are  laid 
there,  his  masterpiece,  "The  Ring  and  the  Book," 
"Lauria,"  "Pippa  Passes"  (his  finest  idyl  or  mask,  to 
give  it  a  name), — besides  a  host  of  lyrics  and  other 
pieces.     Italy  is  the  studio  of  Browning's  art. 

We  have  seen  how  Browning  took  up  monologue,  as 
Hamlet  takes  a  bunch  of  rapiers,  tested  one  or  two  forms, 
found  imperfection  in  them,  and  rejected  them.  At  last 
we  saw  him  grasp  the  particular  form  best  suited  to  his 
genius.  In  "The  Ring  and  the  Book,"  he  found  the 
broadest  scope  for  his  thought  and  a  form  adapted  to 
his  nature.  Let  us  close  our  study  of  the  development 
of  his  art  with  an  examination  of  his  masterpiece. 

"The  Ring  and  the  Book"  is  a  poem  in  blank  verse 
and  contains  a  little  over  twenty  thousand  lines,  broken 
into  twelve  parts.  In  the  first  part,  the  plot  is  told  by 
the  poet,  and  also  the  incident  that  brought  the  story 
to  his  knowledge.  A  manuscript  volume  of  law  briefs, 
and  letters  picked  up  at  a  book-stall  in  Florence,  is  the 
"book"  of  the  title.  The  "ring"  is  a  poet's  fancy.  When 
an  Etruscan  jeweller  wished  to  make  a  ring  of  the  purest 
possible  gold,  he  mixed  the  precious  metal  with  an  alloy. 

[60] 


The  substance  is  then  "a  manageable  mass."  After  he 
has  formed  and  cut  the  ring  to  his  wish,  he  removes  with 
an  acid  the  alloy, — 

"self  sufficient  now  the  shape  remains, 
The  rondure  brave,  the  lilied  loveliness, 
Gold  as  it  was,  is,  shall  be  evermore, 
Prime  nature  with  an  added  artistry — 
No  carat  lost,  and  you  have  gained  a  ring." 

The  poet  compares  himself  to  the  goldsmith,  and  the 
fancy  and  "artistry"  of  the  verse  to  the  serviceable 
alloy  which  will  evaporate  when  once  the  story,  "pure 
gold,"  is  fixed  in  the  reader's  mind.  Each  of  the  eleven 
remaining  books,  except  the  last,  is  given  up  to  an  actor 
in  the  events  narrated,  who  rehearses  the  whole  story 
from  the  side  of  his  personal  experience. 

At  Rome  on  Christmas  night  in  1697,  a  horrible  mur- 
der was  committed.  "The  Ring  and  the  Book"  is  a  his- 
tory of  the  trial. 

An  old  couple  of  some  property,  but  of  no  social  im- 
portance, give  their  daughter,  Pompilia,  a  girl  of  thirteen, 
to  Count  Guido  Franceschini.  The  Count,  for  his  part, 
supplies  a  ruined  fortune  but  an  ancient  name.  He  has 
spent  his  life  in  the  household  of  a  Cardinal,  and  at  fifty 
discovers  that  he  is  still  at  the  bottom  of  the  ladder. 
The  parents  of  Pompilia,  Pietro  and  Violante,  accom- 
pany their  daughter  to  the  estate  of  Guido  in  Arezzo,  he 
being  now  master  of  their  property.     Life  there  is  soon 

[61] 


made  intolerable  for  the  old  people,  and  they  return  to 
Rome.  Once  home  they  spread  the  report  that  Pompilia 
is  not,  after  all,  their  daughter  but  a  foundling  from  the 
dregs  of  the  city.  The  story,  though  terrible,  is  true. 
Violante,  to  please  her  husband,  and  to  secure  the  descent 
of  some  property,  had  pretended  to  give  birth  to  a  child 
that  in  fact  she  had  received  from  a  brothel.  Pietro  had 
been  as  much  deceived  as  his  neighbors. 

A  law-suit  follows  the  disclosure,  in  which  the  old 
people  try  to  recover  Pompilia's  dowry.  The  poor  child, 
left  to  the  mercy  of  the  Count,  has  a  miserable  existence. 
When  Guido  comprehends  her  aversion  to  him,  he  be- 
comes fiendishly  vindictive  and  would  willingly  be  rid  of 
her,  if  he  could  still  retain  her  dowry.  After  four  years 
of  torture,  she  can  endure  her  position  no  longer,  and  to 
save  her  own  soul,  as  well  as  the  life  of  the  child  soon  to 
be  born,  she  flies  to  Rome  with  a  young  Canon,  Giuseppe 
Caponsacchi.  They  are  overtaken  on  the  way  by 
Guido,  and  are  placed  in  custody.  A  trial  of  the  case 
relegated  the  priest  to  an  out-of-the-way  village,  sent 
Pompilia  into  the  Convent  for  Penitents,  and  allowed  the 
Count  to  return  to  Arezzo. 

After  a  time  Pompilia  is  permitted  to  dwell  in  the  house 
of  Pietro  and  Violante,  who  still  love  her,  and  there  her 
son  is  born.  On  getting  news  of  this,  Guido  takes 
four  country  lads,  and  plunges  on  to  Rome,  breaks  in 
upon  the  family  of  his  father-in-law  and  murders  Pietro, 
Violante    and    Pompilia.     The    murderers    flee    blindly 

[62I 


from  the  city,  but  are  found  In  their  bloody  clothes  asleep 
in  a  barn,  where  they  had  flung  themselves  overcome  with 
fatigue.  In  spite  of  a  multitude  of  wounds,  Pompilia 
lives  a  few  days,  and  tells  the  story  of  her  life  to  a  monk. 
The  murderers  are  brought  to  trial;  from  the  court  the 
case  is  sent  up  to  the  Pope,  for  it  was  supposed  that  in- 
asmuch as  the  Count  belonged  to  one  of  the  lower  orders 
of  priesthood,  and  came  from  a  distinguished  family, 
the  papal  decision  would  release  the  prisoners.  This 
hope,  however,  was  disappointed.  The  five  murderers 
were  put  to  death. 

"A  disgusting  story"  you  will  say  "from  beginning  to 
end.  There  is  foulness  enough  in  poor  Pompilia's 
nativity.  You  add  to  the  pile  Violante's  fatal  trick 
which  gave  her  deceived  husband  a  daughter.  Next  you 
heap  up  a  mercenary  marriage — an  innocent  child  of 
thirteen  forced  into  the  arms  of  a  brute  of  fifty.  Then 
follows  the  flight  of  a  wife  with  a  priest;  after  that  the 
murder  of  three  people,  and  the  execution  of  five  more. 
Such  a  festering  mass  one  would  rather  pass  holding  his 
nose.  But  no,  you  hail  us  to  it  and  confide  to  us  that  it 
is  a  great  poet's  masterpiece  of  poetry."  A  critic  inclined 
to  such  argument  could  go  on  at  length  against  Brown- 
ing's masterpiece.  But  when  you  examine  the  facts, 
you  see  that  within  their  limits  can  be  naturally  discussed 
the  questions  that  interest  modern  society.  In  these,  for 
Browning,  lay  the  value  of  the  subject. 

"The  Ring  and  the  Book"  is  a  work  of  art  of  beautiful 
[63] 


design  which  holds  not  only  wise  thoughts  about  life 
and  a  great  play  of  fancy,  but  a  new  creation  to  take  place 
shall  we  say,  among  the  immortals,  Antigone, 
Desdemona,  Ophelia,  and  their  sisters.  We  can  imagine 
that  Browning's  great  poem  has  this  inscription — The 
name  of  the  lady  enshrined  here  is  Pompilia. 

Although  Browning  has  given  voice  in  his  verse  to  so 
many  men  and  women,  few  of  them  are  our  intimates. 
We  smile,  perhaps,  as  we  think  of  Bishop  Blougram  with 
his  worldly  use  of  his  office  and  his  stout  argumentative 
armour;  he  is  real.  Fra  Lippo  Lippi  is  pretty  distinct 
with  the  watchmen  "fiddling"  at  his  throat,  and  Pippa, 
too,  with  her  song  influencing  so  many  lives  as  she  passes 
along. 

"God's  in  his  heaven 
All's  right  with  the  world." 

LucuUus  would  approve  of  the  few  and  select  guests  at 
the  symposium  of  Browning's  creations.  Perhaps  the 
list  could  be  enlarged.  Even  a  dinner-party  after 
Byron's  taste  could  be  arranged  "in  number  equal  to 
the  Muses,"  but  no  immortal  like  Hamlet  or  Lear  among 
them,  unless  we  ask  Pompilia.  She  is  flesh  and  blood  as 
Guido's  hooked  dagger  proved.  Springing  up  out  of  the 
mud  and  resting  upon  dark  waters,  she  is,  always, 
"lilied  loveliness."  She  grew  more  like  a  flower  than  a 
human  being.  No  one  taught  her  anything.  When  her 
husband  showed  the  court  letters  which  he  claimed  she 

[64] 


had  written  Caponsacchi,  full  of  warm  love,  she  defended 
herself  by  saying  very  simply  that  she  knew  neither 
how  to  read  nor  write.  She  is  not  like  the  girls  Roman 
art  students  paint — blank  looking  peasants  with  no  soul 
in  their  faces.  Pompilia  is  a  "woman-child"  who  on  her 
death-bed  could  give  right  answers  to  most  of  the  ques- 
tions that  make  life  perplexing. 

"Marriage-making  for  the  earth, 
With  gold  so  much, — birth,  power,  repute  so  much, 
Or  beauty,  youth  so  much,  in  lack  of  these! 
Be  as  the  angels,  rather,  who  apart 
Know  themselves  into  one,  are  found  at  length 
Married  but  marry  never,  no,  nor  give 
In  marriage,  they  are  man  and  wife  at  once 
When  the  true  time  is:  here  we  have  to  wait." 

Hear  her  talking  to  Caponsacchi,  the   young    Canon 
as  they  are  whirled  along  in  a  carriage  towards  Rome. 

"Tell  me,  are  men  unhappy  in  some  kind 
Of  mere  unhappiness  at  being  men. 
As  women  suffer  being  womanish? 

It  hurts  US  if  a  baby  hides  its  face 
Or  child  strikes  at  us  punily, — 

If******* 

And  strength  may  have  its  drawback  weakness  'scapes." 

A  soul  that  meets  nobly  the  experience  of  life  will. 


without  schoolmasters  or  "the  humanities,"  develop  love- 
liness.    Such  is  the  poet's  thesis  in  Pompilia. 

"It  was  not  given  Pompilia  to  know  much, 

Speak  much,  to  write  a  book,  to  move  mankind. 

Be  memorized  by  who  records  my  time. 

Yet  if  in  purity  and  patience,  if 

In  faith  held  fast  despite  the  plucking  fiend 

*     *     *     If  in  right  returned 

For  wrong,  most  pardon  for  worst  injury. 

If  there  be  any  virtue,  and  praise, — 

Then  will  this  woman-child  have  proved — who  knows? — 

Just  the  one  prize  vouchsafed  unworthy  me. 

Seven  years  a  gardener  of  the  untoward  ground 

I  till." 

So  speaks  the  Pope. 

Caponsacchi,  Pompilia's  deliverer,  stands  before  us 
like  another  Theseus.  We  admire  him  and  the  progress 
he  made  in  understanding  life  through  the  sad  part  he 
played.  Yet  in  a  way  he  is  only  a  study  of  a  young 
Italian  priest  of  the  seventeenth  century.  He  appreciates 
Pompilia,  that  is  his  greatest  recommendation.  His 
feeling  for  her  is  reverence  like  that  for  the  holy  Virgin 
in  the  chancel  of  his  cathedral. 

"You  know  that  this  is  not  love,  sirs,  it  is  faith 
The  feeling  that  there's  God,  he  reigns  and  rules 
Out  of  this  low  world,  that  is  all,  no  harm." 


He  is  brave,  he  is  pure,  but  as  a  poetic  creature  he 
lacks  Pompllia's  charm.  He  learned  that  God  is  served 
not  only  by  administering  the  offices  of  the  church,  by 
writing  verses  for  a  pagan  bishop,  or  by  keeping  his  serv- 
ices to  his  fellows  conventional.  He  discovered  that 
he  served  God  best  when,  after  discovering  Pompilia's 
plight,  he  had  the  courage  to  go  to  her  rescue. 

As  for  Count  Guido,  he  is  a  thorough  villain  with  so 
good  an  excuse  for  himself,  if  you  please,  that  when 
he  described  his  views  of  life  to  the  court,  the  judges 
must  have  shifted  uneasily  in  their  chairs  at  the  likeness 
of  their  own  ideas  to  those  of  a  murderer.  For  the  rub 
was  that  Guido  defended  himself  by  syllogisms,  the 
premises  of  which  were  everyday  maxims  in  society. 
There  was  no  doubt  about  the  soundness  of  the  premises, 
but  the  conclusions  drawn  from  them  unfortunately 
justified  murder. 

"Honor  is  a  thing  of  value,  for  if  I  have  it  anyone 
connected  with  me  is  benefited."  "Certainly,"  replied 
the  world,  "all  hereditary  nobility,  all  patrician  power, 
is  founded  upon  that  fact."  "Then  if  I  share  this  valu- 
able possession  with  someone  who  for  value  received 
gives  me  money,  what  is  wrong  about  the  transaction?" 
When  Guido  married  Pompilia  he  has  done  that  very 
thing.     And  the  judges  find  it  difficult  to  answer. 

Roman  law,  it  appears,  would  have  upheld  Guido  in 
killing  Pompilia  had  he  done  the  deed  after  warm  pur- 
suit, when  he  confronted  the  runaways.    Guido  laug 

[67] 


at  such  discrimination  and  in  a  step  or  two  leads  his 
judges  to  a  point  where  logically  they  must  admit  his 
right  to  kill  his  wife  when  he  did.  "I  may  punish  a  dis- 
obedient servant,  you  say.  When  does  the  instrument 
cease  to  be  allowable, — a  switch,  a  stick,  a  pitchfork,  a 
dagger,  where  should  I  have  stopped?"  Admit  that  the 
end  justifies  the  means,  then  listen  to  Guido: — 

"I  don't  hear  much  of  harm  that  Malchus  did 
After  the  incident  of  the  ear,  my  lords! 
Saint  Peter  took  the  efficacious  way; 
Malchus  was  sore  but  silenced  for  his  life: 
He  did  not  hang  himself  i'  the  Potter's  Field 
Like  Judas,  who  was  trusted  with  the  bag 
And  treated  to  sops  after  he  proved  a  thief." 

Guido  is  too  much  given  to  self-analysis  to  be  a  villain 
in  real  life,  unless  we  call  his  sprightly  psychology  the 
Latin  temperament.  But  when  we  have  closed  the  book 
we  find  him  shaping  himself  distinctly  in  our  memories, 
and  living  by  his  own  rights,  a  thorough  rascal,  like  lago. 

Although  the  plot  of  The  Ring  and  the  Book  is  unique 
in  poetry,  we  can  see  why  Browning  welcomed  "the 
find."  He  wished  from  some  central  position  to  survey 
mankind  and  to  dispense  a  large  benevolence  of  observa- 
tion. For  this  purpose  he  took  a  seat  at  the  trial  held 
in  Rome.  A  trial  in  any  court  brings  all  sorts  of  odd 
intelligence  to  light;  it  ransacks  past  family  history  for 
generations;  it  is  intolerant  of  privacy.     A  court  is  a 

[68] 


rich  laboratory  for  a  philosopher  who  is  a  poet.  From 
a  seat  by  his  friend  the  judge,  he  can  look  upon  all  condi- 
tions of  life  and  can  brood  all  social  questions. 

Browning  secured  these  advantages  by  weaving  his 
poem  around  a  great  trial.  The  bare  facts  of  the  case 
would  retain  their  ugly  look  in  a  novel  or  in  a  play;  prose 
would  not  sufficiently  exalt  them;  the  swift  action  of 
drama  would  not  afford  them  covering.  Yet  a  plot 
like  this,  ranging  from  a  harlot  to  a  pope,  is  necessary  if 
Browning  is  to  give  full  scope  to  his  powers. 

The  four  rustics  who  had  a  hand  in  the  murder  offer 
a  study  in  primitive  human  nature.  They  were  not 
vicious,  merely  ruddy  human  animals.  "A  goat  to 
kill  or  a  man,  what  is  the  difference?"  is  their  pose. 
"Such,"  says  Browning,  "was  man  in  a  state  of  nature; 
such  were  the  vaunted  denizens  of  the  Golden  Age." 
From  their  brutishness  to  Pompilia's  spirituality  is, 
indeed,  a  range.     Hence  the  choice  of  the  plot. 

How  interesting,  too,  to  hand  a  bundle  of  cases,  in 
ethics  and  theology  to  the  final  earthly  appeal,  for  those 
days,  in  such  matters.  The  pope  who  figures  as  the 
final  judge  of  the  questions  is  painted  in  the  white  and 
gold  of  Fra  Angelico's  monastery  walls. 

The  form  of  the  poem  within  its  limits  is  as  rigid 
as  that  of  the  lyric,  epic  or  the  drama.  It  is  not  merely 
eight  or  ten  different  ways  of  telling  the  same  story. 
The  construction  is  carefully  planned;  the  mould  is 
unique.     A  monologue,  when  talked  into  the  air,  like 

[69] 


the  "Mad-house  Cells"  could  be  censured  on  the  ground 
that  it  was  unnatural.  People,  it  is  true,  do  mutter,  do 
soliloquize,  and  doubtless  so  superior  a  company  as 
Browning's  dramatis  personae  might  offer  the  same  ex- 
cuse as  the  man  in  the  anecdote,  taxed  with  talking  to 
himself.  "I  suppose  I  fell  into  the  habit  from  liking  to 
converse  with  a  sensible  person."  Andrea  del  Sarto  is  a 
good  subject  for  monologue,  as  he  vainly  explores  for  doors 
to  Lucrezia's  mind;  so  is  Fra  Lippo  Lippi  over-persuading 
the  watchmen  who  have  caught  him  in  a  frolic. 

Even  a  monologue  addressed  to  someone  named  in  the 
poem  becomes  unnatural  when  it  takes  on  the  length  of 
Bishop  Blougram's  apology.  That  worthy  ecclesiastic, 
notwithstanding  his  good  table,  would  hardly  get  many 
men  to  sit  through  more  than  one  such  harangue.  In 
fact,  the  Bishop's  table-companion  in  the  present  case, 
once  released,  flies  to  the  uttermost  parts  of  the  earth. 
A  man  either  could  not  talk  so  uninterruptedly,  or  he 
would  not  be  permitted  to. 

In  "The  Ring  and  the  Book"  many  of  the  features  we 
object  to  in  the  earlier  monologues  have  disappeared. 
Pompilia's  confession  to  the  Augustinian  is  a  natural 
monologue;  so  is  a  lawyer's  plea,  the  statement  of  a  wit- 
ness (if  he  is  bold  and  fortunate);  a  story  that  one  has  to 
tell;  a  letter  and  a  sermon — all  are  natural  monologues. 
These  are  what  the  separate  parts  of  the  poem  contain, 
except  the  introduction  in  part  one,  and  the  section 
called  The  Pope.     Each  person  tells  his  story  without 

[70] 


interruption — Pompilia  to  tlie  monk,  Guido  and  Capon- 
sacchi  to  the  judges,  the  lawyers  rehearse  their  speeches. 

There  is  something  else  in  "The  Ring  and  the  Book" 
that  reminds  one  of  Greek  dramas.  The  three  great 
choruses,  Half  Rome,  the  Other  Half  Rome,  and 
Tertium  Quid,  although  confined  to  their  sections  in  the 
first  part  of  the  poem,  ring  out  the  changes  of  the 
popular  mind  like  Strophe,  Antistrophe  and  Epode. 

Apart  from  the  general  arrangements,  there  is  a 
studied  effect  produced  by  the  choice  of  characters,  and 
the  particular  sections  of  the  poem  they  command. 
The  lawyer,  Hyacinthus  de  Archangelis,  is  the  comedian 
of  the  piece,  and  like  Shakespeare's  fools,  he  relieves  for 
a  little  our  depression,  and  creates  an  appetite  again  for 
serious  parts.  His  brother-lawyer  we  might  call  the 
satirist  of  the  poem.  Johannes-Babtiste  Bottenus  is  not 
satirical  in  his  words,  nor  is  Hyacinthus  consciously  a 
humorist,  but  after  the  reader  has  been  carried  away 
by  Pompilia's  woes,  he  is  suddenly  brought  face  to  face 
with  the  selfishness  of  Johannes  and  the  good-nature  of 
Hyacinthus,  the  effect  is  equal  to  keen  satire  and  broad 
comedy.  These  lawyers  look  at  the  whole  subject, 
suffering,  sin,  murder,  trial,  and  all,  as  something  sent 
in  the  providence  of  God  to  help  their  fame  a  little,  or  to 
give  their  children  an  extra  allowance  of  bread  and  butter. 

We  have  come  to  the  end  of  our  review  of  Browning's 
use  of  monologue.  If  there  were  time  it  would  be  in- 
teresting to  examine  his  art  in  the  details  of  technique. 

[71] 


The  bold,  vivid  portraits  he  dashes  off  in  a  line  or  two 
should  claim  our  attention;  his  frequent  use  of  alliteration 
and  the  other  amenities  of  style  which  he  is  thought  to 
care  little  about;  the  wonderful  imagery  by  which  he 
helps  us  understand  the  subtle  moods  of  the  soul. 
In  his  early  poems,  similes  stood  out  from  the  body  of 
the  verse,  as  a  button  painted  by  Meissonier  would  stand 
out  on  the  blouse  of  one  of  Millet's  peasants.  In  the 
later  poems  the  tone  of  the  whole  has  been  raised  to  the 
brilliancy  of  the  early  figures.  But  these  minute  studies 
hardly  concern  us  here,  engaged  as  we  have  been  upon 
the  monologue  as  a  whole. 

The  art  of  Browning  in  monologue  was  developed,  it 
would  seem,  as  a  consequence  of  moral  qualities  in  him- 
self and  his  time,  and  of  an  evolutionary  moment  ex- 
hibited in  English  verse.  He  shared  the  seriousness  of 
his  generation  and  wished  to  teach  it  the  meaning  of 
body  and  soul.  He  chose  a  poetic  form,  monologue,  be- 
cause that  form  permitted  a  combination  of  action  and 
description,  where  his  personal  interpretation  of  the  story 
might  at  any  time  intrude.  This  method  led  naturally 
to  a  cold,  metaphysical  and  lifeless  treatment  of  his 
subjects,  which  were  little  more  than  abstractions,  until 
the  discovery  of  Italy  as  a  rich  storehouse  of  traditions, 
personages  and  incidents  fortunately  rescued  him,  and 
gave  his  themes  warmth  and  motion.  Browning  is  never 
truly  a  dramatic  poet, — one  who  lets  life  act  itself  freely 
before  his  readers.     He  muses  upon  life,  to  be  sure,  in 

[72] 


vigorous  speech  but  still  in  terms  of  the  intellect 
rather  than  in  terms  of  action.  He  is  analytical,  search- 
ing the  consciousness  of  his  characters  for  motives,  moods 
and  spiritual  processes,  and  these  he  expounds  with  all 
the  virile  brilliancy  of  his  strong  nature  and  with  all 
the  egoism  associated  with  soliloquy. 

Browning  at  his  best  made  the  appeal  of  a  deeper  con- 
fession of  experience,  in  a  direct  and  conversational  style; 
he  uncovered  the  realities  behind  English  conventional- 
ities. 

In  his  "My  Last  Dutchess,"  "Any  Wife  to  Any  Hus- 
band," "The  Statue  and  the  Bust,"  Browning  notified 
his  readers  that  they  might  think  and  talk  straight  about 
problems  essential  to  their  lives.  He  gave  courage  to 
the  expression  of  natural  emotion.  Byron  and  Shelley 
led  foreign  revolts.     Browning  a  domestic  reformation. 

Browning  had  a  theological  method  but  he  indulged 
in  a  sincerity  of  expression  about  sex  that  gave  a  sense  of 
support  and  liberation  to  many  minds  that  puritanism 
had  confused,  and  that  the  new  paganism  had  alarmed. 

Browning  gave  English  and  American  women  a  new 
sense  of  social  and  religious  freedom  without  the  loss  of 
their  comfort  and  respectability.  Byron  was  too  foreign 
and  too  robust.  In  Browning  there  is  homeopathic 
liberty  with  allopathic  conservatism  of  behavior.  The 
lover  and  husband  of  Elizabeth  Barrett  could  be  fol- 
lowed even  when  he  seemed  ranging  on  dangerous 
moral  grounds. 

[73] 


His  marriage  was  incalculably  ideal  according  to  Eng- 
lish notions — romantic  and  conventional.  The  result 
was  literary  acceptance  even  when  not  understood.  In 
fact,  perhaps  his  challenge  of  style  obscured  what  other- 
wise might  have  been  a  challenge  of  subject  matter.  For 
no  poet  of  his  generation  except  Swinburne  talked  so 
plainly  about  fleshly  things. 

But  Browning's  language  was  stronger  than  his 
thought.  He  never  went  far  in  social  emancipation  and 
he  did  not  go  so  far  as  his  wife  went  in  political  emancipa- 
tion. Even  the  young  Canon  in  "The  Ring  and  the 
Book"  is  held  in;  this  Renaissance  Sir  Galahad  was  only 
fitted  out  with  a  sense  of  duty,  and  was  allowed  no  heart 
flutterings  in  his  rescue  of  the  Countess. 

After  all,  Browning,  the  poet,  lived  in  an  English  park 
in  which  one  section  was  a  wild  garden.  He  strolled 
about  from  one  part  of  the  park  to  another,  dressed  in  the 
habiliments  of  an  Alpine  climber  and,  on  occasions,  he 
sat  down  for  long  periods  on  a  bench. 


74 


The  Religion  of  Shakespeare 

WHEN  we  assemble  in  a  cathedral  to  celebrate 
the  350th  anniversary  of  Shakespeare's  birth, 
and  the  celebration  in  which  we  participate  is 
one  of  thousands  of  gatherings,  official  and  informal,  for 
a  like  purpose,  we  involuntarily  ask  ourselves  an  un- 
pleasant question:  What  if  Shakespeare  were  not,  after 
all,  the  author  of  the  works  that  bear  his  name?  What  if 
Francis  Bacon  wrote  the  plays  we  have  witnessed  when 
we  went  to  the  theatre  to  "see  Shakespeare."  For  us 
to  honor  a  man  with  fervid  enthusiasm  for  work,  achieved 
by   another,  would  make  us  ridiculous. 

The  question,  "Did  Bacon  write  Shakespeare?"  admits 
fortunately  of  a  brief,  satisfactory  answer;  one  that  can 
quickly  relieve  our  minds  without  plunging  us  into  the 
recondite  reckonings  of  modern  cabalists. 

Bacon  did  not  possess  a  powerful  imagination.  For 
this  reason  he  was  not  a  great  man  of  science,  for  imagina- 
tion is  essential  to  scientific  discovery.*  If  Francis 
Bacon  had  too  little  imagination  to  be  a  great  scientist, 
he  certainly  had  too  little  imagination  to  be  a  great  poet. 
He  surely  could  not  have  produced  the  greatest  creatures 
of  the  imagination  in  modern  literature. 

*Karl  Pearson's  Grammar  of  Science,  p  34,  note. 

[75] 


Shakespeare  overtopped  other  dramatists  by  the  power 
of  his  imagination.  He  did  not  excel  in  technique;  nor 
in  plot;  but  in  characterization  and  poetry.  That  is  to 
say,  he  excelled  in  spiritual  construction  and  beauty  by 
sheer  force  of  imagination.  The  imaginative  quality  of 
Shakespeare's  work  will  be  that  which  appeals  more  and 
more  to  his  admirers. 

But  why  concern  ourselves  about  the  religion  of 
Shakespeare?  "The  play  is  the  thing."  Why  query 
about  the  creed  of  the  playwright?  Besides,  the  drama 
being  an  objective  picture  of  life,  what  would  be  the 
criterion  for  deciding  which  of  the  views  expressed  by 
his  characters  were  his  own,  and  which  were  selected 
merely  as  suitable  to  his  dramatis  personnae? 

Fortunately  for  us,  outside  the  list  of  Shakespeare's 
plays  there  are  poems  amd  sonnets  which  strike  so  per- 
sonal a  note  that  we  cannot  help  but  believe  they  express 
the  poet's  own  opinion.  Those  we  can  study  for  informa- 
tion about  Shakespeare's  religion.  Well,  then,  suppose 
Shakespeare  did  leave  a  confession  of  faith,  how  does 
that  concern  us  who  have  the  plays? 

A  man's  religious  views  sum  up  what  he  considers  to 
be  the  underlying  principles  of  his  life  as  well  as  his 
motives  for  action.  To  gain  an  idea  of  what  the  greatest 
English  poet  conceived  to  be  fundamental  to  our  deepest 
experiences,  as  motive,  as  purpose,  as  reward,  would 
not  only  paint  the  poet's  portrait  spiritually,  but  would 

[76] 


seem  to  relate  him  in  a  substantial  fashion  to  humanity 
— which  loves  intimate  portraiture. 

By  religion,  most  of  us  mean  belief  in  creeds,  dogmas, 
rites,  sacraments,  holy  hopes.  In  searching  out  Shake- 
speare's religion  we  should  probably  ask,  Did  Shakespeare 
believe  in  God?  Did  he  believe  in  the  life  of  the  soul 
after  death?  Did  he  believe  in  prayer?  Does  he  show 
interest  in  the  general  Christian  way  of  describing  relig- 
ious experiences  as  a  theological  scheme  of  incarnation, 
atonement,  et  cetera?  What  does  he  say  about  the  soul, 
sin,  justice,  truth? 

We  shall  be  disappointed  in  Shakespeare's  religion  if 
we  study  it  from  this  ordinary  standpoint.  But,  at 
any  rate,  we  shall  be  upon  familiar  ground;  we  shall  be 
employing  customary  standards. 

A  surmise  of  the  poet's  religion  might  be  hazarded 
from  the  attitude  of  great  minds  in  the  Elizabethan  age. 
The  notable  event  of  the  i6th  Century  was  its  break 
with  religious  authority  (brought  about  by  the  Prot- 
estant Reformation)  and  its  turning  from  scholasticism 
to  nature. 

So  it  is  a  significant  fact  that  one  of  our  few  Shake- 
speare autographs  is  found  in  a  copy  of  Montaigne's 
Essays — Montaigne,  the  skeptic.  Emancipated  from  the 
scholastic  tyrannies  of  mediaeval  thought,  Montaigne's 
freedom  in  the  treating  of  life  as  he  saw  it,  has  given  him 
a  permanent  place  in  literature. 

Montaigne  was  thirty-one  years  old  when  Shakespeare 
[77] 


was  born.  The  Essays  were  published  when  Shakespeare 
was  a  boy  of  sixteen.  If  they  fell  into  his  hands  during 
the  1580's,  they  must  have  powerfully  affected  his  youth. 
Montaigne's  father  was  by  birth  an  Englishman.  The 
great  essayist  himself  found  inspiration  in  the  Roman 
philosophy  of  Seneca  and  Plutarch.  He  adjusted  the 
New  Protestantism  to  the  Old  Catholicism  by  a  tolerance 
which  sprang  from  his  individualism  and  from  his  doubt 
of  absolute  truth. 

England  was  a  land  of  Protestants  and  of  Catholics 
held  together  by  the  elastic  offices  of  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer.  Montaigne  solved  some  of  Shakespeare's  prob- 
lems and  showed  in  himself  the  sort  of  man  religiously 
that  Shakespeare  depicted  in  his  heroes,  his  kings  and 
courtiers.  The  type  of  man  the  dramatist  most  sym- 
pathetically dealt  with  outside  of  the  historical  plays  did 
not  parade  religion,  but  was  polite,  philosophical,  tol- 
erant to  religious  usages  and  to  the  mysteries  in  human 
life  upon  which  formal  religion  is  built  up. 

This  skeptical  attitude  is  characteristic  of  those  who 
are  bound  for  any  reason  to  old  institutions  and  yet  feel 
the  call  of  new  ideas.  Such  minds  are  arranged  in  com- 
partments. In  some  of  those  compartments  action  is 
loyal  to  tradition  by  force  of  habit  or  by  reason  of  ad- 
vantage; while  in  others  action  eagerly  follows  free  and 
independent  thought. 

We  find  in  the  plays  a  respectful  treatment  of  the 
church  and  its  officials,  not  only  the  English  Church 

[78] 


but  the  Church  of  Rome.  We  find  also  great  use  made 
of  the  supernatural  not  merely  for  the  purposes  of  the 
theatre,  but  as  though  it  constituted  in  the  author's 
thought  the  veritable  background  of  life.  Macbeth, 
Hamlet,  The  Tempest,  are  almost  based  upon  the 
supernatural.  Hamlet's  remark: 
"There  are  more  things  in  heaven  and  earth,  Horatio, 

Than  are  dreamed  of  in  your  philosophy" 
has  so  sincere  a  ring  as  to  incline  one  to  feel  that  the 
thought  could  not  have  been  indifferent  to  Shakespeare 
himself.  But  while  Shakespeare  was  superstitious 
toward  the  invisible  world,  and  religiously  complaisant 
toward  this  world,  he  too,  like  Montaigne,  studied  life 
with  a  free  mind. 

Skepticism — a  formal  holding  to  the  old  and  waving 
an  enthusiastic  greeting  to  the  new — is  the  religious 
attitude  of  intellectual  leaders  in  the  ancient  and  modern 
world,  whose  particular  distinction  has  been  that  while 
they  felt  the  present  to  be  founded  upon  the  past,  they 
themselves  were  inspirers  of  the  future.  Socrates  bade 
Crito  to  offer  a  cock  to  Aesculepius  at  the  moment  he 
was  to  suffer  death  for  his  atheism.  Matthew  Arnold 
denied  the  fundamental  dogmas  of  Christianity  yet 
united  with  his  fellows  in  divine  worship  in  Christian 
churches. 

If  we  look  into  Shakespeare's  sonnets  and  poems  for 
specific  religious  utterances,  we  may,  I  said,  be  dis- 
appointed.    We  do  not  find,  for  instance,  such  use  of  the 

[79] 


word  God  as  to  convince  us  that  Shakespeare  held  to  a 
belief  in  a  personal  deity. 

This  silence  or  non-commitment  is  the  more  remarkable 
because  in  his  time  many  men  of  high  poetic  power 
wrote  on  distinctly  religious  themes.  Sir  Philip  Sidney 
translated  the  Psalms.  Donne  wrote  divine  poems. 
One  was  called  The  Soul's  Progress.  Constable  wrote 
sacred  sonnets.  The  master  of  all  writers  of  sonnets, 
Petrarch,  two  centuries  earlier  used  Biblical  phrases. 
(Compare  Sonnet  15).  But  in  Shakespeare  I  cannot 
find  any  of  these  evidences  of  conventional  religious 
interest — certainly  not  a  use  of  religious  phraseology. 

Shakespeare  did  not  deal  with  the  love  of  God  but  the 
love  of  men  and  women.  He  knew  love  as  it  played  a 
part  in  human  life.  He  did  not  speculate.  He  did  not 
feign  satisfaction  for  the  deep  longings  of  his  own  heart, 
as  Dante  had  done,  by  devising  pictures  of  immortal 
lovers.  When  he  felt  despair  at  the  thought  of  love's 
brief  life,  circumscribed  by  human  existence,  he  could 
only  guess  that  love  might  survive  the  grave;  might  con- 
quer death — the  longer  by  reason  of  the  finer  material 
of  the  memorial — namely,  his  poetry.  He  made  memory 
the  only  immortality. 

"Not  mine  own  fears,  nor  the  prophetic  soul 
Of  the  wide  world,  dreaming  on  things  to  come. 
Can  yet  the  lease  of  my  true  love  control, 
Suppos'd  as  forfeit  to  a  confin'd  doom. 
[80] 


The  mortal  moon  hath  her  eclipse  endur'd, 
And  the  sad  augurs  mock  their  own  presage; 
And  peace  proclaims  olives  of  endless  age. 
Now  with  the  drops  of  this  most  balmy  time 
My  love  looks  fresh,  and  Death  to  me  subscribed 
Since,  spite  of  him,  I'll  live  in  this  poor  rhyme. 
While  he  insults  o'er  dull  and  speechless  tribes: 
And  thou  in  this  shall  find  thy  monument, 
When  tyrants'  crests  and  tombs  of  brass  are  spent." 

Sonnet  107. 

But  what  did  our  poet  consider  death  to  be?  This  is  a 
pertinent  question  for  the  student  of  Shakespeare's 
religion,  since  religion  in  the  past  has  been  so  largely 
co,ncerned  with  the  fate  of  the  dead  and  with  the  unseen 
world.  The  tone  of  the  sonnets  is  not  hopeful.  In- 
ferences drawn  from  chance  lines  rather  than  from  de- 
liberate treatment  may  not  be  considered  the  strongest 
arguments;  yet  what  is  positive  in  a  man  gets  said. 
Blanco  White's  line: 

"If  light  can  thus  deceive,  wherefore  not  life," 
and  Milton's  line: 

"They  also  serve  who  only  stand  and  wait" 

fix  the  hopes  and  beliefs  of  the  authors  as  well  as  a  volume. 
But  among  the  two  thousand  lines  in  the  sonnets,  there 
is  no  such  hopeful  utterance  about  death.  "Death's 
dateless  night";  "the  edge  of  doom";  "That  fell  arrest 

[81] 


without  all  bail";  "churl  death,"  these  are  the  sonnet's 
description  of  death.  Shakespeare  sees  no  light  through 
death's  door.  His  doubt,  his  wish  against  his  doubt, 
and  his  hopelessness  in  sonnets  71,  73,  and  74  are  painful. 
He  bids  his  friend: 

"No  longer  mourn  for  me  when  I  am  dead 
Than  you  shall  hear  the  surly,  sullen  bell 
Give  warning  to  the  world  that  I  am  fled 
From  this  vile  world,  with  vilest  worms  to  dwell." 

Sonnet  71. 

But  this  thought  is  too  terrible  and  he  hastens  to 
exhort  the  friend  to  love  him  well  for  there  are  but  a 
few  more  years  left  for  friendship.  Then  he  comforts 
himself  with  a  poor  pretense.  His  verse,  he  says,  con- 
tains his  true  self  and  spirit,  which  will  survive  his  death 
and  will  remain  with  his  friend. 

Death  is  so  terrible  a  destroyer  that  the  only  way  to 
meet  it  is  to  have  shorn  one's  self  during  one's  life  of  all 
it  can  take  away.  This  is  asceticism  without  the  an- 
chorite's hope  of  future  rewards. 

"Poor  soul,  the  centre  of  my  sinful  earth, 
Fooled  by  those  rebel  powers  that  thee  array. 
Why  dost  thou  pine  within  and  suffer  dearth. 
Painting  thy  outward  walls  so  costly  gay.-* 
Why  so  large  cost,  having  so  short  a  lease, 
Dost  thou  upon  thy  fading  mansion  spend? 

f82l 


Shall  worms,  inheritors  of  this  excess. 

Eat  up  thy  charge?    Is  this  thy  body's  end? 

Then,  soul,  live  thou  upon  thy  servant's  loss, 

And  let  that  pine  to  aggravate  thy  store; 

Buy  terms  divine  in  selling  hours  of  dross; 

Within  be  fed,  without  be  rich  no  more; 

So  shalt  thou  feed  on  Death,  that  feeds  on  men. 

And  Death  once  dead,  there's  no  more  dying  then." 

Sonnet  146. 

On  the  other  hand,  Shakespeare's  sense  of  sin  as  of 
a  wrong  done  to  the  soul  of  man,  is  keen. 

"The  expense  of  spirit  in  a  waste  of  shame 
Is  lust  in  action;  and  till  action,  lust 
Is  perjur'd,  murd'rous,  bloody,  full  of  blame." 

Sonnet  129. 

Shakespeare  hates  sin  as  much  as  any  Puritan  but  re- 
gards it  not  as  a  rebellion  against  God  but  a  wrong  done 
by  the  body  against  the  soul,  to  be  loathed  because  it 
wastes  man's  spirit.  Yet  sin,  he  thinks,  has  its  ordered 
place  in  the  scheme  of  the  world;  it  is  not  an  unexpected 
intruder  or  ultimately  antagonistic  to  the  good. 

"O  benefit  of  ill!  now  I  find  true 
That  better  is  by  evil  still  made  better." 

Sonnet  119. 

Shakespeare,  as  Josiah  Royce  remarks,  came  to  a 
stronger  faith  through  evil  experiences  and  made  a  better 

[83] 


success  of  his  life  than  did  Milton,  who  was  the  greater 
idealist. 

Although  the  Christian  religion  is  built  around  the 
idea  of  the  sinfulness  of  man,  and  Shakespeare  detested 
sin,  I  cannot  find  any  signs  in  the  sonnets  of  his  sym- 
pathy with  Christianity.  The  absence  of  avowed  opin- 
ion is  not,  of  course,  conclusive. 

But  Christianity  is  an  aggressive  faith.  Concealment 
of  the  faith  has  been  among  Christians  a  reproach. 
Love  poems  may  not  be  the  best  instruments  for  the 
expression  of  religious  belief,  yet  Spenser  found  beauty 
in  biblical  imagery  and  thus  addressed  his  mistress: 

"Thou  glorious  image  of  the  maker's  beautie 
My  soverayne  saynt,  the  Idoll  of  my  thought 

*  4>  *  *  *  *  * 

And  of  the  brood  of  angels  heavenly  born 
And  with  the  crew  of  blessed  saints  unborn." 

Amoretti  Sonnet  6i. 

Spenser  not  only  referred  to  God  but  called  him 
maker.  The  word  God  (spelled  with  a  capital),  I  do 
not  remember  once  in  Shakespeare's  sonnets,  even  as 
an  exclamation.  The  words  heaven  and  hell  are  used, 
but  how?     In  Sonnet  29  we  find  the  line: 

"And  trouble  deaf  heaven  with  my  bootless  cries." 
[84] 


This  is  the  voice  of  neither  a  pagan  or  a  Christian.     It 
sounds  very  much  like  the  cry  of  modern  materialism. 

Again,  in  the  following  lines,  we  have  the  word  heaven 
used  perhaps  in  the  conventional  way,  but  the  limiting 
word  "my"  quickly  turns  it  into  a  metaphorical  mean- 
ing. 

"Then  give  me  welcome,  next  my  heaven  the  best, 

Even  to  thy  pure  and  most  most  loving  breast." 

Sonnet  no. 

Usually  Shakespeare  uses  the  words  heaven  and  hell 
figuratively,  as  to  "pass  a  hell  of  time";  again,  speaking 
of  pleasures  that  bear  a  very  bitter  fruit,  he  says: 

"Yet  none  knows  well 
To  shun  the  heaven  that  leads  men  to  this  hell." 

Sonnet  129. 

Sonnet  121  has  sometimes  been  interpreted  as  a  rebuke 
to  the  Puritans  and  their  contempt  for  the  theatre.  It 
begins  with  the  quatrain: 

"  'Tis  better  to  be  vile  than  vile  esteemed, 

When  not  to  be  receives  reproach  of  being; 

And  the  just  pleasure  lost,  which  is  so  deemed, 

Not  by  our  feeling,  but  by  others'  seeing." 

Sonnet  121. 

At  any  rate,  it  is  a  protest  against  a  theory  we  hear 
advanced  even  now  that  conduct  should  not  only  be 
stainless  but  that  it  should  be  devoid  of  offense. 

[8^ 


Another  slap  at  the  Puritan  theology  was  contained 
in  Sonnet  105,  Let  not  my  love  be  called  idolatry." 
The  best  human  emotions  must  not  be  given  bad 
names. 

When  Shakespeare  threw  his  glance  upon  life  as  a 
whole,  what  did  he  think  of  it  as  indicated  in  his  son- 
nets? He  is  saddened  by  the  similarity  of  man's  position 
in  the  world  to  that  of  all  other  material  things  (Son.  15). 
He  sees  everywhere  "simple  truth  miscall'd  simplicity," 
and  "captive  good  attending  captain  ill."  (Son.  66.) 
He  thinks  the  world  has  deteriorated  from  a  time. 

"When  beauty  liv'd  and  died  as  flowers  do  now. 
Before  these  bastard  signs  of  fair  were  born, 
Or  durst  inhabit  on  a  living  brow; 
Before  the  golden  tresses  of  the  dead. 
The  right  of  sepulchres,  were  shorn  away. 
To  live  a  second  life  on  second  head." 

Sonnet  68. 

The  more  I  read  the  sonnets,  the  more  I  feel  the  sad- 
ness of  their  tone.  Not  a  wail,  not  an  imaginary  burden 
like  that  of  some  19th  Century  poets,  but  a  terrible  sup- 
pressed apprehension  that  the  doom  of  man  may  be  a 
death  that  has  no  waking.  The  feeling  sometimes 
thrown  off,  repeatedly  returns.  Then  he  draws  closer  to 
his  friend;  then  he  is  sure  that  love  is  the  only  divine 
thing,  and  the  beauty,  truth  and  constancy  in  our  lives 
the  jewels  to  be  cherished. 

[86  1 


Shakespeare's  religion  is  not  of  the  conventional  kind — 
it  is  not  essentially  supernatural  nor  is  it  dogmatic;  it 
also  utterly  fails  to  disclose  belief  in  the  usual  tenets  and 
symbols  of  Christianity.  Shakespeare's  religion  is  the 
worship  of  the  power  of  love.  Shakespeare  understood 
from  personal  experience  the  transforming  power  that 
love  possesses  as  witnessed  by  St.  John,  and  he  has 
written  almost  identical  words, 

St.  John: 

"And  all  mine  are  thine,  and  thine  are 
mine;  and  I  am  glorified  in  them." 

Shakespeare  in  "Let  the  bird  of  loudest  lay," 
"So  they  loved,  as  love  in  twain 
Had  the  essence  but  in  one." 

Professor  George  Herbert  Palmer,  of  Harvard  Univer- 
sity, discovers  in  Shakespeare's  sonnets  a  progressive 
and  deeply  spiritual  experience.  Many  of  his  sonnets 
call  upon  the  young  man,  to  whom  the  first  126  were 
written,  not  to  permit  his  beauty  and  graces  to  perish 
from  the  earth,  but  to  perpetuate  them.  Beyond  this 
conception  of  a  "natural  immortality,"  Shakespeare  pro- 
ceeds to  a  view  of  "ideal  immortality,"  to  be  secured 
his  friend  by  the  praises  of  undying  verse.  From  this 
ideal  immortality  he  advances  to  an  "intellectual  and 
spiritual  immortality,"  "in  which  we  know  ourselves  as 
moral  beings,  capable  of  commanding  circumstances 
instead  of  accepting  their  compulsions." 

[87] 


"Here  is  Spiritual  Immortality.  Man  is  a  spirit,  no 
mere  creature  of  circumstance,  passive,  instantaneous, 
dependent  on  alien  forces  within  and  without,  which 
sweep  him  along  their  blind  current,  regardless  of  any 
good  of  his  own.  He  is  an  active  being,  dictatorial  over 
time  and  circumstances,  with  power  to  compel  chance 
and  change  to  work  for  his  permanent  welfare.  Such  an 
understanding  of  immortality,  grounded  in  the  nature 
of  personality,  gives  a  hope  more  specific  than  the  Ideal 
Immortality  of  fame,  more  humanly  significant  than  the 
Natural  Immortality  of 'breed'." 

That  this  immortality  which  so  exalts  personality  and 
its  control  of  the  outward  can  control  death,  would  seem 
to  be  a  by-product  of  Prof.  Palmer's  idea  of  personality 
as  participating  in  the  Absolute.  Outside  of  Hegelian- 
ism,  such  a  leaping  across  the  chasm  of  death  may  not 
be  easy  to  reason — only  to  faith. 

Shakespeare,  as  the  poet  of  feudalism,  upholds  the 
aristocracy  and  laughs  at  the  people  in  a  way  that  will 
probably  provoke  in  the  future  more  criticism  and  secure 
for  his  work  less  popular  attention  than  in  the  pajt.  At 
any  rate,  his  is  not  a  religion  which  derives  its  significance 
from  service — it  is  not  a  religion  of  humanity. 

Shakespearian  official  religion  would  seem  to  be  a 
superstition  of  supernaturalism,  with  a  polished  tolerance 
for  existing  and  established  forms,  but  only  sincere  and 
vital  in  so  far  as  it  was  a  belief  in  the  laws  of  spiritual 
growth,  through  high  relationship,  love  and  loyalty. 


Shakespearian  personal  religion  is  not  the  religion  of 
humanity;  nor  is  it  dogmatic  faith,  nor  is  it  a  mysticism; 
but  the  perception  of  the  creative  and  transforming 
power  of  love  and  the  destructive  spiritual  power  of  all 
that  contradicts  this  highest  union. 

Shakespeare  is  so  large  a  part  of  English  Literature 
and  of  current  dramatic  attention  that  we  never  think  of 
him  as  belonging  to  the  Middle  Ages.  Yet  if  he  is  to  be 
placed  religiously,  it  must  be  with  the  thought  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  or  at  best  with  the  transition  period 
between  the  Middle  Ages  and  modern  times.  The 
characteristic  of  the  transition  was  the  extreme  one- 
sidedness  of  the  religious  attitude — mysticism  concen- 
trated on  God,  skepticism  concentrated  upon  the  world. 

In  Shakespeare's  religion  we  see  the  beginning  of  a  new 
harmony — the  harmony  of  modern  life — a  world  con- 
structed by  spiritual  causes.  We  also  see  the  method: 
viz.,  an  individual  spiritual  experience  which  proceeds  to 
interpret  life  and  to  mould  life  freely  according  to  its 
own  experiences. 

Shakespeare  learned  subjectively,  yet  by  means  of  a 
relationship,  the  spiritual  laws  of  the  soul:  First,  the 
creative  power  of  love: 

"Love  is  too  young  to  know  what  conscience  is; 
Yet  who  knows  not,  conscience  is  born  of  love." 

—  Sonnet  151. 

[89I 


Secondly,  the  unifying  power  of  love: 

"Two  distinct,  division  none,* 
Number  there  in  love  was  slain." 

Thirdly,  the  denial  of  ownership: 

"Either  was  the  other's  mine." 
Property  was  thus  appalled 
That  the  self  was  not  the  same 
Single  nature's  double  name 
Neither  two  nor  one  was  called." 

Fourthly,  the  deeper  rationality  of  love: 
"Love  hath  reason,  reason  none 
If  what  parts  can  so  remain." 

All  this  sounds  very  much  like  St.  John's  Gospel.  Both 
have  a  modern  side. 

The  new  idea  of  the  individual  and  of  society  cannot 
better  be  fulfilled  than  by  the  religious  exaltation  of 
Jesus: 

"All  mine  are  thine  and  thine  are  mine." 

But  this  was  also  the  spiritual  experience  of  Shake- 
speare. 

When  we  have  the  power  to  transform  life,  proceeding 
from  out  of  life  itself;  a  capacity  to  destroy  selfish  isola- 
tion and  to  secure  social  identification  and  service,  how 
far  can  the  spiritual  construction  of  life  be  carried?     We 


*Threnody  in  "The  Passionate  Pilgrim." 
[90] 


do  not  know.  We  believe  it  can  substitute  freedom  for 
authority;  peace  for  war;  co-operation  for  hatred  and 
antagonism;  respect  in  place  of  arrogance;  worship  for 
lust;  and  service  for  exploitation. 

Can  spiritual  construction  of  life  also  create  immor- 
tality? Is  it  in  itself  everlasting?  Is  it  a  power  eternal? 
We  do  not  know.  Only  an  act  of  faith  permitted  by  the 
marvels  of  the  soul's  power  and  accomplishment  in  this 
life  can  give  us  hope  and  comfort  and  belief  in  the  life  to 
come. 


91 


Feodor  Dostoevsky 

TURGENEV  called  Dostoevsky  mad.  His  disposi- 
tion was  morbid,  his  experiences  tragic,  his  theor- 
ies fantastic.  If  his  friend  Turgenev,  of  the 
same  race,  generation  and  art  understood  him  so  little 
as  to  question  his  sanity,  how  can  one  of  a  different  race, 
era  and  profession  set  him  before  you  clothed  and  in  his 
right  mind;  some  one  to  be  warmly  concerned  with? 

A  clergyman  is  breathing  his  native  air  in  Dostoevsky's 
world.  Superstition,  instinct,  spiritual  refinements  of 
experience  and  tortures  of  soul,  confessions,  forgiveness, 
faith,  the  supernatual,  the  wisdom  of  babes,  the  inspira- 
tion of  the  humble  and  hurt,  renunciation,  sacred  scrip- 
tures, national  churches,  inexorable  divine  law,  transi- 
toriness,  weakness,  simplicity,  meekness,  sinfulness,  pity, 
patience,  gentle  judgment,  despair,  perdition — these 
emanations  of  humanity  have  already  for  the  clergyman 
a  personality.  They  are  his  familiars.  When  the  clergy 
discover  Dostoevsky  they  will  go  crazy  over  him  as  in 
the  last  century  they  did  over  Wordsworth,  Browning 
and  Tolstoi.  He  is  an  individualist,  so  are  they;  he 
believes  all  the  forces  of  life  are  from  within,  so  do  they; 
he  believes  in  the  child-spirit  as  voicing  the  deity,  so  do 
they;   he   believes  in   the  miracles,   in  immortality,   in 

[92] 


the  Bible  as  do  they.  He  obeyed  dreams  and  presenti- 
ments. But  I  am  going  too  far.  While  I  am  under- 
pinning my  own  authority  as  a  writer  about  Dostoevsky, 
I  fear  that  I  am  weakening  the  authority  of  Dostoevsky 
himself. 

Yes,  he  is  a  preacher,  but  cannot  be  confined  in  any 
group.  That  is  what  astonishes  me.  This  Russian 
novelist  of  narrow  intensities,  of  national  prejudices,  of 
old-fashioned  Hmitations,  not  up-to-the-times,  and  lack- 
ing international  sympathies,  hating  Germany,  ill  at 
ease  in  Italy,  is  a  nut  that  must  be  cracked  before  we  can 
enjoy  our  modernity,  our  internationalism,  our  improved 
conditions,  our  democratic  equalities,  our  science. 

I  have  found  out  several  unexpected  things  about 
Dostoevsky: 

(i)  He  has  had  a  more  extraordinary  personal  history 
than  any  of  the  writers  of  our  times. 

(2)  He  is  a  propagandist  of  Christian  mysticism  be- 
yond any  modern  in  literature. 

(3)  He  is  the  voice  of  old  Russia  in  its  racial  and 
instinctive  inspirations  as  against  the  incoming  of  western 
ideas — modern  science,  Roman  Catholicism,  Socialism, 
western  Europe's  belief  in  force,  etc. 

(4)  He  actually  has  a  place  in  the  philosophy  of  the 
19th  Century  as  being  the  writer  whose  gospel  of  struggle 
through  weakness,  excited  Nietzsche  to  such  antagonism 
as  to  produce  his  gospel  of  the  "will  to  power"  and  "the 
superman." 

[93] 


(5)  He  is  a  profound  psychologist.  He  mined  deeper 
into  his  characters  than  any  modern  writer.  He  discov- 
ered the  new  psychology  before  the  psychiatrists.  The 
region  he  displayed  has  become  the  Golconda  of  modern 
philosophy. 

II. 

DOSTOEVSKY'S  father  was  a  doctor  (connected 
with  a  hospital  for  the  poor  of  Moscow);  his  mother 
was  the  daughter  of  a  Moscow  merchant.  Although 
his  family  was  of  noble  origin,  it  no  longer  belonged 
to  the  laTge  or  small  landowning  class  of  assured 
income  (as  did  Turgenev  and  Tolstoi)  but  to  the  lower 
and  undistinguished  professional  class  of  precarious 
incomes.  The  need  of  money  was  almost  as  much  at 
the  front  door  of  Dostoevsky's  life,  as  it  was  of  Balzac's. 
His  lack  of  means  has  to  be  remembered  at  every  step  of 
his  literary  work:  in  his  feverish  choice  of  subject;  in  his 
desperate  rush  to  complete  his  task;  in  his  prolixities  of 
treatment,  which  gave  him  in  magazine  form  a  larger 
price  for  his  product;  and  in  the  worries  that  clouded  his 
most  productive  days. 

As  a  young  man,  after  initial  literary  success,  which 
placed  him  at  the  age  of  twenty-three  among  the  literary 
leaders  of  his  country,  he  became  a  student  of  French 
Socialism,  of  the  mild,  Fourier,  co-operative  type.  He 
was  arrested  along  with  a  group  of  similar-minded  friends 
and  was  condemned  to  death.     While  waiting  in  a  public 

[94] 


square  for  the  execution  of  the  sentence  (all  the  youths 
were  to  be  shot),  a  reprieve  came  and  a  commutation  of 
the  sentence  from  death  to  exile  in  Siberia.  A  young 
man  of  applauded  literary  gifts,  the  rival  of  Turgenev, 
who  was  two  years  his  senior,  he  was  turned  out  of 
Europe  into  Asia;  out  of  the  society  of  intellectuals  into 
that  of  criminals;  out  of  civilization  into  frontier  exis- 
tence; and,  worst  of  all,  he  was  denied  the  use  of  his  gifts. 

Dostoevsky  came  back  from  Siberia  a  conservative;  a 
great  criminal  psychologist;  a  genius  without  the  right 
to  publish  his  writing;  a  suppliant  for  the  expression  of 
his  pent  up  thought.  He  also  brought  back  from  Siberia 
almost  an  old  man's  confidence  in  the  national  institu- 
tions and  instincts  of  the  Russian  nation.  Dostoevsky 
surrendered  and  abjured  quite  sincerely  his  Socialist 
philanderings.  He  bowed  in  quiet  submission  to  the 
Autocrat  of  all  the  Russias  without  arri^re  penste.  He 
worshipped  the  national  consciousness.  He  plunged 
backward  and  downward  into  the  depths  of  Russian 
experiences  and  forsook  the  path  of  European  economic 
and  social  ideas. 

The  bare  chronology  of  his  life  is  significant: 
1 821.     Born  in  Moscow 


1837 

1843 
1844 
1846 
1849 


Entered  Military  School  of  Engineers 

Left  Military  School  with  rank  of  sub-lieutenant 

Left  the  Army 

Published  "Poor  Folk" 

Arrested  (April  23) 

\9S\ 


1 849-     Reprieved   from   the  scaffold   and  sentenced  to 

Siberia  (December  22) 
1854.     Became  a  common  soldier 

1856.  Made  a  non-commissioned  officer 
*'        Regained  the  rank  of  officer 

1857.  Married  Madame  Issaev 

1858.  Right  of  hereditary  nobiHty  restored.     Left  the 

Army 
i860.     Returned  to  St.  Petersburg 

1861.  Published  "Injury  and  Insult" 
Published  "Buried  Alive" 

1862.  Visited  the  continent  of  Western  Europe  for  the 

first  time 
1864.     Death  of  his  wife  and  of  his  brother  Michael 

1866.  Published  "Crime  and  Punishment" 

1867.  Married  Anna  Grigorievna  Snitkin 
"         Published  "The  Gambler" 

1868.  Published  "The  Idiot" 
1871.     Published  "The  Possessed" 

"         Returned  to  St.  Petersburg 
1876.     Commenced  "The  Diary  of  a  Writer" 
1879-80.     Finished  "The  Brothers  Karamazov" 
1881.     Died  in  St.  Petersburg 
The  list  of  his  works  is  quickly  counted. 
"Poor  Folk" 
"The  Double" 
"Mr.  Prokharchin" 
"The  Landlady" 
[96] 


"A  Weak  Heart" 

"Stepanchikovo  Village" 

"Sleepless  Nights" 

"The  Honest  Thief" 

"The  Friend  of  the  Family" 

"Uncle's  Dream" 

"Injury  and  Insult" 

"Buried  Alive" 

"Crime  and  Punishment" 

"The  Gambler" 

"The  Idiot"    y 

"The  Permanent  Husband" 

"The  Possessed" 

"The  Hobbledehoy" 

"The  Underground  Spirit" 

"The  Diary  of  a  Writer" 

"The  Brothers  Karamazov" 
Modern  Russian  art  did  not  have  as  a  foundation  the 
ideals,  the  methods,  or  the  masterpieces  that  western 
Europe  inherited  from  the  Middle  Ages.  The  13th 
Century,  so  boasted  about  in  the  west,  was  an  epoch  in 
Russia  of  Mongol  invasion;  the  beginning  of  centuries  of 
barbarous  warfare.  Not  until  the  middle  of  the  i8th 
Century  was  the  Russian  language  fitted  for  literary  use 
by  Lomonosov.  The  University  of  Moscow  was  then 
founded  and  the  Imperial  Academy  of  Arts. 

The  Russia  that  we  know  was  born  of  the  French 
Revolution    and    the   invasion    of  Napoleon.     Yet    her 

[97] 


reaction  was  almost  Oriental.     Her  land  lapsed  back 
into  inactivity. 

"She  heard  his  legions  thunder  by, 
Then  plunged  in  dreams  again." 

Her  writers  (a  brood  born  with  the  waning  Napoleon) 
offered  largely  a  religious  cure  for  the  hurts  of  the 
Russian  soul.  While  Germany  was  perfecting  a  system 
of  education  and  working  toward  political  unity;  while 
France  after  reaction  was  developing  subsequent  revolu- 
tion, and  carrying  out  the  ideas  of  '92;  while  England 
after  reaction  was  battling  in  her  Parliament  for  political 
and  economic  reforms,  Russia  was  reaching  a  profounder 
self-consciousness,  not  through  industrial,  political  or 
educational  institutions  (Russia  was  denied  these  agen- 
cies) but  through  poetry,  fiction,  painting  and  music — 
this  to  the  point  of  imminent  revolution;  for  revolutions 
are  moments  of  supreme  insight.  As  time  went  on, 
Russia  developed  reforms,  but  they  proceeded  from 
influence  brought  to  bear  upon  the  autocrat  of  Russia; 
they  were  not  the  outgrowth  of  an  orderly  political  evolu- 
tion. Like  wounds  that  heal  dangerously  from  the  top, 
they  had  to  be  cut  open  afresh  for  deeper  healing. 

Russia,  then,  which  had  no  Middle  Ages  or  Renais- 
sance; no  early  bloom  corresponding  to  the  cinque-cento 
burst  forth  in  the  post-Napoleonic  decade  with  a  storage 
of  energy,  a  treasury  of  national  legend,  traits,  customs, 

[98] 


folk  song,  ballad,  and  a  range  of  influence  that  carried 
her  art  into  the  front  rank.     Russia  produced  giants. 

Among  the  towering  personalities,  who  created  Rus- 
sian art  (Pushkin,  Glinka,  Gogol,  Turgenev  and  Tolstoi) 
was  Dostoevsky.  Profoundly  influenced  by  Dickens, 
Balzac,  Victor  Hugo  and  by  the  Russian  Dickens,  Gogol, 
he  is  nevertheless  different  from  his  literary  masters.  He 
is  an  entirely  new  literary  product,  as  appears  not  only 
in  the  depth  of  his  human  studies,  but  in  the  intense 
nationalism  of  his  point  of  view,  as  well  as  in  his  antag- 
onism to  European  ideas.  When  I  read  Dostoevsky 's 
eloquent  diatribes  against  western  science,  I  am  reminded 
of  the  arguments  launched  against  our  own  American 
civilization  by  visiting  Hindus,  Buddhists,  Theosophists, 
Bahaists.  They  exalt  the  passivity  of  the  Orient,  which 
they  misname  spirituality;  they  decry  the  bigness,  force 
and  rush  of  the  west,  which  they  label  materialism. 

In  personal  appearance  Dostoevsky  gives  one  the  im- 
pression of  racial  characteristics  that,  while  peculiarly 
Russian,  are  neither  patrician  nor  peasant. 

Dostoevsky  had  light  red  hair;  a  thin  beard;  blue  eyes; 
a  somewhat  narrow  intensity  of  vision,  with  sweetness  of 
expression  and  an  appearance  of  cultivation.  He  had 
not  the  beauty  of  Turgenev — that  Russian  type  that 
compares  in  appearance  to  Americans  like  Longfellow, 
nor  had  he  the  mujik-like  features  of  Tolstoi. 

In  temperament  he  was  highly  neurotic.  When  a 
young  man  he  developed  epilepsy.     He  was  also  pestered 

[99] 


by  what  psychologists  call  the  delusion  of  reference — a 
nervous  egoism  so  sensitive  that  everything  which  hap- 
pens, or  which  others  do  and  say,  is  regarded  as  having 
sinister  personal  reference. 

The  story  of  his  break  with  Turgenev  illustrated  his 
temperamental  ill-health.  Having  been  invited  by  Tur- 
genev to  a  party  in  St.  Petersburg  (just  fancy,  they  were 
both  distinguished,  the  host  of  25  and  the  guest  of 
23).  Dostoevsky  turned  up  late.  As  he  entered  the 
room  he  heard  the  assemblage's  laughter.  He  imagined 
that  they  were  laughing  at  him  and  beat  a  hasty  retreat; 
rushed  out-of-doors  without  a  hat  and  paced  the  sidewalk 
for  an  hour  or  two.  Worse  still,  on  account  of  this 
absurd  fancy  he  bore  a  grudge  for  years  against  Tur- 
genev. Is  it  to  be  wondered  at  that  Turgenev  called 
him  mad? 

Dostoevsky 's  nature  was  not  sociable  or  attuned  to 
polite,  conventional  intercourse.  He  was  egotistic, 
gloomy,  dictatorial — very  sensitive  in  his  friendships 
with  men  and  women.  He  was  easily  offended  and 
made  much  of  misunderstandings.  He  was  unlike  Tur- 
genev, the  man  of  the  world;  or  Tolstoi,  the  man  of  the 
fields.  He  was  the  man  of  a  single  city — St.  Peters- 
burg— where  he  led  a  submerged  and  gloomy  life. 
"I  live!  I  am  in  a  thousand  torments,  but  I  live!  I  am 
on  the  pillory,  but  I  exist!  I  see  the  sun,  or  I  did  not  see 
the  sun,  but  I  know  that  it  is  there.  And  to  know  that 
there  is  a  sun  is  enough." 

f  100  1 


An  indefatigable  worker,  he  did  not  allow  his  epileptic 
fits,  which  shattered  his  strength,  to  keep  him  from  his 
desk  but  a  day  or  two.  "Believe  me,  dear  (he  wrote  his 
niece)  I  literally  toil  day  and  night;  if  I  am  not  pre- 
cisely writing,  I  am  walking  up  and  down  the  room 
smoking  and  thinking  of  my  work."*  To  his  friend, 
Maikov,  he  writes  from  Vevey:  "I  intend  in  any  event 
to  go  back  to  Russia.  To  get  the  book  done,  I  must  sit 
at  my  desk  for  at  least  eight  hours  daily. 

"I  have  grown  quite  stupid  from  sheer  hard  work,  and 
my  head  feels  as  if  it  were  in  pieces. "t 

He  had  dramatic  talent,  like  his  English  admiration, 
Dickens.  He  was  a  masterly  reader  and  declaimer  of 
poetry  and  gave  public  recitations  from  the  Russian. 

His  chirography  was  nice.  His  letters  were  carefully 
formed  and  compared  in  beauty  to  the  manuscript  of 
Dumas  pere. 

He  had  the  faults  of  pride,  of  haste,  and  of  misinter- 
pretations, but  he  did  not  have  the  faults  of  selfishness 
or  meanness.  His  character  was  singularly  rich  in  the 
Christian  virtues,  which  he  lauded — gentleness,  a  deep 
patience  (in  spite  of  hasty  action),  conscientious  work, self- 
sacrifice  for  others.  His  inner  life  was  patterned  on  Bible 
teachings;  for  to  him  the  Bible  was  the  greatest  of  books. 

To  his  friend,  N.  L.  Osmidov,  he  wrote:  "I  recommend 
you  to  read  the  whole  Bible  through  in  the  Russian 
translation.     The  book  makes  a  remarkable  impression 

*Letters,  p.  153.    fLetters,  p.  149. 

[lOl] 


when  one  thus  reads  it.  One  gains,  for  one  thing,  the 
conviction  that  h^manity  possesses,  and  can  possess,  no 
other  book  of  equal  significance."* 

In  another  letter  he^bids  his  friend  "think  of  the  noblest 
words  that  ever  yet  were  spoken:  I  desire  love  and  not 
sacrifice. "t 

Baron  Vrangel,  who  was  with  him  in  Siberia  and  knew 
him  all  his  life,  said:  "Dostoevsky's  indulgence  for  every- 
one was  quite  extraordinary.  He  found  excuses  for  even 
the  worst  of  human  traits  and  explained  them  all  by 
defective  education,  the  influence  of  environment,  and 
inherited  temperament."  "Ah,  my  dear  Alexander 
Yegorovitch,  God  has  made  men  so,  once  for  all!"  he 
used  to  say.  He  sympathized  with  all  who  were  aban- 
doned by  destiny,  with  all  the  unhappy,  ill  and  poor. 
Everyone  who  knew  him  well  knows  of  his  extraordinary 
goodness  of  heart. 

In  Dostoevsky  the  great  Russian  traits  of  pity  and 
patience  were  illustrated.  From  Siberia  he  wrote:  "I'll 
rejoice  greatly  that  I  find  there  is  patience  in  my  soul 
for  quite  a  long  time  yet,  that  I  desire  no  earthly  pos- 
sessions and  need  nothing  but  books,  the  possibility  of 
writing  and  of  being  daily  for  a  few  hours  alone. "J  He 
shows  an  unworldliness  suitable  to  his  own  monks  who 
are  such  high  personages  spiritually,  and  so  likeable. 

He  hated  Europe;  but  in  order  to  escape  imprisonment 
for  debt  in  St.  Petersburg,  he  had  to  live  out  of  his  sacred 

*Letters,  p.  233.  fLetters,  p.  297.   JLetters,  p.  71. 
[  102] 


Russia  for  several  years.  Dostoevsky  had,  too,  the 
discipline  of  sorrow.  Death  sentence,  exile,  imprison- 
ment, poverty  and  a  second  exile  for  debt,  then  bereave- 
ment following  bereavement,  were  all  crowded  into  his 
three  score  years.  Loss  brought  him  not  only  sorrow  but 
domestic  responsibility.  After  the  death  of  his  wife  and 
daughter,  when  his  brother  died,  he  took  upon  himself 
the  support  of  his  brother's  family. 

Listen  to  a  simple,  sorrowing  heart:  "My  Sonia  is  dead; 
we  buried  her  three  days  ago.  Two  hours  before  her 
death  I  did  not  know  that  she  was  to  die.  The  doctor 
told  us,  three  hours  before  she  died,  that  things  were 
going  better  and  she  would  live.  She  was  only  a  week 
ill;  she  died  of  inflammation  of  the  lungs." 

"Ah,  my  dear  Apollon  Nikolayevitch,  my  love  for  my 
first  child  was  probably  most  comical;  I  dare  say  I 
expressed  it  most  comically  in  my  letters  to  all  who  con- 
gratulated me.  I  have  doubtless  been  ridiculous  in 
everybody's  eyes,  but  to  you,  to  YOU,  I  am  not 
ashamed  to  say  anything.  The  poor  little  darling  creature, 
scarcely  three  months'  old,  had  already,  for  me,  indi- 
viduality and  character.  She  was  just  beginning  to 
know  and  love  me,  and  always  smiled  when  I  came 
near.  And  now  they  tell  me,  to  console  me,  that  I  shall 
surely  have  other  children.  But  where  is  Sonia?  Where 
is  the  little  creature  for  whom  I  would,  believe  me, 
gladly  have  suffered  death  upon  the  cross,  if  she  couUl 
have  remained  alive?"* 

♦Letters,  p.  147. 

[103] 


Ill 

No  country  of  Europe  seems  to  reflect  so  immediately 
in  its  emotional  life  the  phases  of  its  aspirations  as  does 
Russia.  In  other  countries  there  are  more  outlets  for 
mental  and  moral  energy,  more  dispersive  areas  con- 
sisting of  comparatively  free  undertakings — political, 
commercial  and  even  religious.  Artzybashev's  novel, 
Sanine,  depicts  the  helplessness  of  Russian  institutions 
to  take  up  the  shock  and  sorrow  of  dissipated  political 
hopes.  After  the  overthrow  of  revolutionary  hopes  in 
1905  Russian  youth  could  turn  to  sex  adventure  as  the 
only  recourse  from  the  defeat  of  their  social  dreams. 

Dostoevsky  took  his  stand  upon  Russian  nationality, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  knew  Russia  was  weak  in  its 
consciousness  of  nationality — indeed,  that  this  was 
Russia's  great  weakness — "national  consciousness  is  our 
weak  spot."*  He  made  Russia's  unconscious  national 
depths  his  gospel. 

The  peculiarities  of  Dostoevsky 's  subject  matter  are 
not  only  personal  to  him  as  an  author,  but  also  to  the 
Russian  people.  They  are  more  moved  by  pity  than  the 
rest  of  us;  they  are  less  the  prey  of  social  ambition  and 
shibboliths;  they  are  more  open  and  unabashed  at  self- 
disclosures;  they  are  less  practical,  more  tolerant,  easy- 
going, more  "childish  and  crude,"  to  use  Dostoevsky's 
word.  Gogol  shows  them  so.  Dostoevsky  himself  does 
the  very  things  in  Siberia,  in  Russia,  Germany,  Italy, 
that  his  characters  might  do. 

*Letters,  p.  152. 

[  104] 


The  life  of  the  Russian  people  has  been  turned  inward, 
like  the  life  of  India  and  Palestine,  because  in  outward, 
natural  directions,  avenues  of  free  advance  were  closed. 
If  India  had  given  birth  to  an  Aristotle,  it  would  not 
have  produced  a  Buddha;  if  Palestine  had  yielded  a 
Caesar,  it  would  not  have  produced  a  Christ.  Without 
the  outlet  of  science  or  of  politics,  the  soul  has  to  satisfy 
its  hunger  by  feeding  upon  itself. 

So  in  Russian  literature  we  find  the  deep  personal  note 
together  with  profound  confidence  in  the  instincts  of  the 
people.  Even  Russian  music  has  consciously  become  the 
servant  of  humanity.  You  feel  this  in  Moussorgsky's 
Boris  Godounov — in  the  religious  ecstasy  of  the  kneeling 
people  while  the  knout  snaps  across  their  backs.  Mous- 
sorgsky's dictum  was:  "To  feed  upon  humanity  is  the 
whole  problem  of  art."  So  Dostoevsky  sounded  the 
depths  of  national  strangeness.  "I  have  my  own  ideas 
about  art,"  he  said,  "and  it  is  this:  What  most  people 
regard  as  fantastic  and  lacking  in  universality,  I  hold  to 
be  the  inmost  essence  of  truth.  Arid  observation  of 
everyday  trivialities  I  have  long  ceased  to  regard  as  real- 
ism— it  is  quite  the  reverse." 

But  already  Dostoevsky  had  made  this  confidence  in 
the  people  the  basis  of  Russian  development.  ".  .  .  . 
with  the  people  lies  our  whole  salvation."  The  people 
were  the  sacred  depository  of  the  divine  revelation.  In 
their  personal  religion  they  witnessed  the  coming  of  God 
to  them.     They  are  Oriental  in  their  confidence  in  the 

[  105  ] 


inner  life  and  in  the  presence  of  God  among  men.  G. 
Lowes  Dickinson  noticed  this  similarity  of  religious  atti- 
tude between  Russia  and  India. 

"But  the  Indian  peasant  does  really  believe  that  the 
true  life  is  the  spiritual  life;  he  respects  the  saint  more 
than  any  other  man;  and  he  regards  the  material  world 
as  'unreal,'  and  all  its  cares  and  illusion.  I  have  seen 
on  the  faces  of  poor  Indians  at  religious  functions  an 
expression  I  have  seen  nowhere  else,  unless,  perhaps,  in 
Russian  churches." 

"Out  of  this  common  faith  that  God  reveals  himself 
to  the  people  and  that  their  burdens  and  humiliations, 
their  patience  and  meekness  are  of  a  heavenly  origin,  has 
come  the  idea  so  much  insisted  on  by  Dostoevsky:  that 
the  mission  of  the  Russian  people  is  to  reveal  to  our 
civilization  the  Russian  Christ  by  means  of  the  Orthodox 
church.  "I  am  not  quite  sure",  said  Dostoevsky  in  a 
letter  to  Strachov,  "that  Danilevsky  will  dwell  with 
sufficient  emphasis  upon  what  is  the  inmost  essence  and 
the  ultimate  destiny  of  the  Russian  nation:  namely,  that 
Russia  must  reveal  to  the  world  her  own  Russian  Christ, 
whom  as  yet  the  peoples  know  not,  and  who  is  rooted 
in  our  native  orthodox  faith.  There  lies,  as  I  believe, 
the  inmost  essence  of  our  vast  impending  contribution  to 
civilization,  whereby  we  shall  awaken  the  European 
peoples;  there  lies  the  inmost  core  of  our  exuberant  and 
intense  existence  that  it  so  be."* 

*Letters,  p.  176. 

fio61 


Dostoevsky  could  not  be  happy  without  his  own  Russia 
around  him.  More  unbearable  than  his  exile  in  Siberia 
was  his  exile  in  Germany  and  Italy.  Even  in  the  land 
of  the  orange  and  myrtle,  in  Italy,  a  second  birth-place 
to  Goethe,  to  Browning  and  to  many  another  nordic 
Dostoevsky  was  homesick. 

"I  cannot  understand  the  Russian  abroad.  Even 
though  there  is  a  wonderful  sky  here,  and  though  there 
are — as,  for  example,  in  Florence — literally  unimaginable 
and  incredible  marvels  of  art,  there  are  lacking  many 
advantages  which  even  in  Siberia,  as  soon  as  I  left  the 
prison,  made  themselves  evident  to  me:  I  mean,  espe- 
cially, home  and  the  Russians,  without  which  and  whom 
I  cannot  live."* 

Perhaps  even  this  Russian  national  consciousness, 
which  Dostoevsky  introduces  us  to,  or  tries  to  develop, 
is,  to  some  extent,  a  proud  reaction  against  Europe. 
The  same  process  is  going  on  in  Japan  and  America. 
After  contact  with  more  advanced  nations,  which  de- 
velops admiration  for  them  there  is  a  rebound.  Imita- 
tion is  succeeded  by  aggressive  nationalism.  Japan 
became  European  after  its  revolution,  then  turned  to  an 
intensely  Japanese  culture.  We  in  America  do  not  care 
so  much  as  we  did  in  the  middle  of  the  19th  Century 
what  Europe  thinks  of  us.  New  nations,  after  their  first 
foreign  hero  worship,  choose  self-sufficient  ideals  peculiar 
to_,themselves. 

*Letters,  p.  161. 

[  107] 


Dostoevsky  Ignored  the  effect  of  the  very  thing  he 
wished  to  preserve — the  effect  of  the  old  Russian  ways, 
faith,  monasteries,  deep-rooted  superstitions — the  things 
that  make  Russia  homelike  to  a  Russian.  He  was  a 
fish  out  of  water  when  out  of  his  native  country;  yet 
oddly  enough  he  did  not  admit  the  salutary  advantage 
of  environment,  the  influence  of  institutions,  the  value 
of  improved  social  and  political  machinery  as  contribu- 
tions to  human  progress.  In  short,  Dostoevsky  was  a 
good  psychologist  but  a  poor  sociologist. 

IV 

Dostoevsky's  greatest  work,  if  one  consider  the  im- 
portance of  the  theme  and  the  symmetry  of  execution,  is 
"Crime  and  Punishment."  A  student  in  St.  Petersburg 
without  resources  to  continue  his  studies,  and  out  of  con- 
ceit with  the  usual  student  method  of  raising  funds  by 
teaching  and  by  translation,  conceives  the  idea  that  it  is 
permissible  for  him — in  fact,  that  it  will  ally  him  with 
the  great  and  masterful  characters  in  history — to  murder 
an  old  woman  pawnbroker  and  use  her  property  as  a 
pedestal  of  future  service  and  distinction.  This  mon- 
strous theory  is  fed  by  his  poverty  and  at  last  masters 
him.  The  terrible  deed  is  done,  but  it  is  contrived  so 
clumsily  that  it  involves  a  second  unpremeditated  mur- 
der and  the  letting  loose  of  a  cloud  of  furies.  The  Rus- 
sian police;  the  law  officers  of  the  government;  the  search- 
ings  of  his  own  conscience;  his  intolerable  relations  to  his 

[io8] 


friends,  even  to  his  own  family,  drive  him  to  the  preci . 
pice  of  madness. 

Around  him,  too,  is  a  constellation  of  unhappy  lives. 
A  drunken  Marmeladov,  a  sensualist  Svidrigailov,  and 
the  most  lovely  of  all  his  creations,  a  child  with  the 
Yellow  Ticket,  Sonia,  who  had  gone  on  the  streets  to 
keep  the  roof  over  the  head  of  her  drunken  father,  her 
half-crazed  mother  and  the  smaller  children.  How  much 
Dostoevsky  himself  cared  for  Sonia  may  be  guessed  by 
the  fact  that  two  years  later  he  gave  his  own  daughter 
that  name. 

The  mental  struggles  of  the  murderer  to  escape  the 
toils  of  the  law;  the  misunderstandings  of  those  who  love 
him;  his  incomprehensible  behavior;  the  machinations  of 
his  enemies,  form  a  mass  of  incidents,  mental,  emotional, 
conversational,  of  matchless  intensity.  The  psycho- 
logical solution  is  reached  before  the  dramatic  denoue- 
ment in  court.  In  the  course  of  the  relations  of  Raskol- 
nikoff  with  Sonia,  he  makes  a  confession  to  her  which 
draws  from  the  child  a  world  of  atoning  direction  and 
consolation.  That  Sonia  follows  Raskolnikoff  to  Siberia 
is  merely  an  epilogue  of  what  already  for  the  central 
figures  is  a  completed  drama. 

"The  Idiot,"  strange  as  it  may  seem  from  the  title,  is 
perhaps  the  most  agreeable  of  Dostoevsky 's  work.  This 
is  owing  to  the  charm  of  the  character  of  Prince  Myshkin 
and  to  the  attractiveness  of  the  women  in  the  story. 
But  the  book  is  not  so    well    balanced,  as  "Crime  and 

[  109] 


Punishment."  Some  parts  while  always  showing  care- 
ful— in  fact,  masterly  development  of  scene  and  character 
— are  spun  out  in  a  lengthy  fashion  that  forgets  sym- 
metry and  worse  still,  wearies  the  reader. 

Dostoevsky  evidently  had  for  the  character  Myshkin 
well-founded  personal  sympathy  and  affection.  Like 
himself,  this  hero  was  an  epileptic  who  for  most  of  his 
youth  had  been  in  the  care  of  a  doctor  in  Switzerland. 
At  the  age  of  twenty-six  or  twenty-seven  he  returns  in 
pretty  good  physical  and  mental  condition  to  St.  Peters- 
burg, to  find  out  about  an  inheritance  (which  is  kept 
for  some  time  in  the  background  of  the  story)  and  to 
connect  himself  with  the  life  of  his  country  to  which  in 
spirit  he  is  enthusiastically  attached.  Immediately 
upon  his  arrival  in  the  capital  he  introduces  himself  to 
a  distinguished  family  believing  that  there  was  a  blood- 
tie  between  them.  The  three  handsome  daughters  of 
this  family  contribute  many  attractive  chapters.  But 
Prince  Myshkin's  adventure  with  a  woman,  a  sufferer 
from  her  girlhood  from  the  attentions  of  her  guardian, 
who  now  wished  to  be  free  of  this  entanglement  with  his 
ward,  and  to  marry  suitably,  is  the  explosive  power  of 
the  story.  The  book,  in  fact,  consists  of  a  series  of  duels 
or  personal  encounters — they  can  hardly  be  said  to  be 
love  affairs,  they  are  so  tempestuous  and  tragic.  The 
men  are  "The  Idiot"  Prince  Myshkin  and  Rogozhin — a 
passionate  and  half-educated  young  man,  the  inheritor 
of  a  large   fortune  from   rich  peasant  ancestors.     The 

[no] 


women  are  Nastasya  Filipovna,  the  unhappy  ward, 
and  Aglaia  Epanchin,  one  of  the  three  daughters  of  the 
Prince's  relative.  Out  of  furious  encounters  stalks  noth- 
ing but  tragedy.  Nastasya  is  murdered  by  Rogozhin, 
who  in  turn  is  sent  to  Siberia.  Myshkin  is  self-exiled 
from  his  beloved  Russia  in  the  custody  of  his  Swiss  doc- 
tor and  degenerated  into  sheer  idiocy.  Aglaia  marries 
a  worthless  Polish  adventurer.  "The  Idiot"  is  abyssmal 
tragedy! 

"The  Brothers  Karamazov"  is  the  story  of  four  men 
of  widely  different  temperaments,  the  children  of  an 
inextinguishable  sensualist,  by  three  mothers,  one  being 
the  vagrant  idiot  girl  of  the  village.  The  reaction  of 
these  four  natures  against  that  of  their  father,  which 
results  in  his  murder  at  the  hands  of  the  child  of  the  idiot 
girl,  acquiesced  in  and  almost  suggested  by  his  most 
intellectual  son,  and  for  which  the  one  most  like  him  is 
convicted  and  sent  to  Siberia;  while  the  saintly  Alyosha 
plays  over  the  scene  like  a  benignant  spirit,  forms  the 
body  of  the  story.  In  the  background  is  a  Russian 
monastery.  Dostoevsky  knew  these  well.  He  ran  in 
and  out  of  them  as  a  boy.  He  liked  them  all  his  life 
and  gives  a  beautiful  picture  of  the  spirit  of  the  guiding 
intelligence  in  these  monastic  groups  and  of  their  bene- 
factions to  the  Russian  people.  "The  Brothers  Kara- 
mazov" loses  the  momentum  of  its  tremendous  initial 
interest  before  the  end  of  the  story,  which  naturally 
slackens  after  the  suicide  of  the  real  murderer.     The 

[III] 


analyses  that  follow  matter  little  to  a  reader  unless  he 
is  fond  as  Dostoevsky  is  of  pulling  apart  and  putting  on 
the  table  the  different  parts  of  the  workings  of  the  human 
mind.  Perhaps  the  author  would  say  that  the  closing 
chapters  of  "The  Brothers  Karamazov"  gave  him  the 
opportunity  to  call  attention  to  the  follies  and  mistakes 
of  the  Russian  judicial  system,  and  the  ease  with  which 
justice  miscarries. 

Having  himself  been  a  victim  of  this  system,  he  pos- 
sibly was  particularly  anxious  to  depict  it. 

"The  Possessed"  is  the  most  diffuse  of  his  larger 
works — the  least  justified  too  in  its  theme — which  at 
bottom  is  an  attack  upon  the  Russian  reformers,  whom 
he  egregiously  belittles.  The  book  is  a  profuse  illustra- 
tion of  a  remark  in  one  of  Dostoevsky's  letters:  "Nihilism 
isn't  worth  talking  about.  Only  wait  until  this  scum 
that  has  cut  itself  adrift  from  Russia  is  quite  played- 
out. 

Readers  of  Dostoevsky  finish  his  novels  with  certain 

commanding    scenes    burned    into     their     brains.       In 

"Crimes  and  Punishment"  it  is  a  scene  between  Raskol- 

nikoff  and  Sonia,  in  her  chamber,  when  seated  upon  her 

bed  he  confesses  his  crime  and  she  reads  him  the  New 

Testament  story  of  the  resurrection  of  Lazarus.     I  know 

nothing  in  literature  more  inspired.     In  "TheTdiot"  it 

is  a  scene  where  Nastasia  on  her  birthday,  under  the 

guise  of  a  birthday  party,  calls  to  her  home  some  of  the 

*Letters,  p.  192. 

[112] 


men  who  are  closest  to  her  life  and  tries  to  settle  their 
various  demands,  expressed  or  understood.  One  of  them 
(her  guardian)  wishes  to  be  free  of  her  that  he  may  make 
a  distinguished  marriage  and  settle  down.  One  wishes 
to  marry  her  to  secure  protection  and  promotion  in  busi- 
ness. Another  passionately  desires  her  and  puts  in  her 
hand  100,000  rubles  to  bind  the  bargain.  She  throws 
the  package  into  the  log  fire.  In  the  midst  of  all  this 
thunderous  and  sulphurous  clearing  of  the  air,  the  wom- 
an herself  goes  mad.  To  meet  the  consummate  need 
of  her  poor,  broken  soul,  the  need  of  an  honorable  friend, 
Prince  Myshkin  "The  Idiot"  offers  to  marry  her.  These 
elements  of  the  scene,  taken  together  with  the  back- 
ground of  Russian  customs  and  with  the  power  of  cumu- 
lative effect  that  Dostoevsky  is  master  of,  produces  an 
overwhelming  situation — an  explosion  in  the  life  of 
each  character. 

In  "The  Brothers  Karamazov"  the  extraordinary 
scene  is  between  the  child  of  the  idiot  girl  and  the  in- 
tellectual brother,  in  which  their  two  brains  almost 
subconsciously  fit  into  each  other,  with  suggestions  which 
are  hardly  expressed  but  understood,  and  lead  to  the 
murder  of  the  father  by  the  bastard  boy. 

In  "The  Possessed"  it  is  the  attempt  of  the  charlatan 
leader  of  the  people,  Pete,  to  save  his  face,  and  perhaps 
his  life,  by  securing  from  Kisseleff  a  promise  of  suicide 
which  will  free  him  from  the  terrors  of  discovery  and 
punishment.     When,    however,    the    horrified    follower 

[113] 


from  whom  so  much  is  expected,  refused  to  make  good 
his  promise  to  kill  himself,  he  is  murdered  by  his  chief. 

All  of  these  situations  are  cumulative  creations  in 
which  extraordinary  passions  meet  at  a  given  point. 
They  are  not  simple  but  complex  activities  which  ex- 
press a  reaction  of  mind  and  feeling  and  are  not  dependent 
only  upon  outer  incidents.  In  Dostoevsky,  while  his 
action  so  often  inspires  terror,  his  crises  are  psychological 
and  not  melodramatic. 

Perhaps  it  is  outside  of  his  greater  works,  whose  size 
seems  to  match  their  greatness,  that  Dostoevsky's 
quality  is  most  masterfully  seen.  Take  for  instance,  the 
matchless  psychological  study  in  his  "Letters  from  the 
Under- World."  A  man  of  forty-one,  who  feels  the 
sting  of  many  humiliations  of  failures,  is  attracted  by  a 
girl  of  about  sixteen,  who  comes  to  his  pawnbroking 
establishment  time  and  time  again,  to  get  rid  of  trifles 
which  he  sees  show  the  depth  of  her  poverty.  She  even 
tries  by  advertising  in  newspapers  to  find  a  position  as 
governess  or  companion,  and  finally  in  desperation  offers 
to  do  the  most  menial  work.  She  is  living  with  some 
aunts  of  semi-respectability.  These  our  pawnbroker 
approaches  with  an  offer  of  marriage  to  the  child. 

In  spite  of  their  differences  in  age  and  temperament, 
her  sense  of  gratitude  at  first  leads  her  to  express  af- 
fection for  her  husband  and  to  delight  in  their  new  life. 
But  his  theory  of  her  subordination  to  him;  of  her  proper 
worship  and  devotion  to  him;  his  stern  discipline  and 

[114] 


mean  economies,  little  by  little  strip  away  her  childish 
brightness  and  destroy  her  gratitude.  Her  tortures  at 
his  hand  arouse  her  to  intrigue;  but  she  is  too  pure  to 
suffer  from  so  false  a  position  or  to  permit  its  consumma- 
tion. Maddened  continually  by  his  inexplicable  moods, 
she  tries  to  summon  the  courage  to  shoot  him.  We  see 
him  lying  on  the  sofa,  pretending  to  sleep,  while  she 
plays  about  his  face  with  the  cold  barrel  of  a  revolver. 
This  is  the  memorable  scene  of  the  little  story,  but  the 
end  is  too  piteous — her  leap  from  the  window,  clutching 
her  poor  icons— the  pictured  promise  of  something 
kinder  than  the  hard  heart  of  man. 

In  telling  this  story  the  husband  does  not  use  his 
wife's  name  (so  we  cannot  recall  her  by  her  name).  He 
is  silent  like  those  worshippers  of  a  God  who  dared  not 
call  out  the  designation  of  their  supreme  divinity. 

V. 

You  may  not  feel  intimate  with  Dostoevsky's  charac- 
ters, as  you  perhaps  do  with  those  of  Dickens  or  Thack- 
eray, but  you  know  them  as  you  know  no  other  persons 
in  fiction — almost  as  the  Judgment  Day  will  know  them. 
Possibly  this  is  not  the  true  comparison,  this  difference 
in  our  knowledge  of  the  characters  in  English  fiction 
and  in  Russian.  The  difference  in  our  experiences  may 
lie  in  psychological  depth.  The  Russians  seem  emo-  ~]n 
tionally  richer  than  other  Europeans.  What  we  take  to 
be  greater  workmanship  in  the  Russian  novelists — es- 

[115] 


pecially  Dostoevsky — may  in  part  be  a  discovery  of 
richer  material  in  the  inner  life  of  the  Russian  people. 
All  his  heroes  are  powerful  natures,  broken  by  wrong 
thinking  or  by  trifling  with  action. 

We  may  not  feel  the  intimacy  with  Dostoevsky's 
characters  that  we  do  with  the  creations  of  other  nov- 
elists, for  the  reason  that  they  elude  us  as  if  in  the 
hands  of  fate.  The  tragedy  of  Dostoevsky's  work  is 
not  at  the  end  but  to  be  felt  every  moment  in  the  escap- 
ing consummation  of  his  personages, — their  elusiveness, 
their  instability,  not  so  much  of  personal  fortune  as  of 
personal  determination.  The  fatefulness  of  character; 
the  reaction  of  natures  upon  each  other;  the  spiritual 
outcome  of  action  and  conviction, — all  these  exercise 
such  a  control  over  his  thronging  people  that  you  know 
them  with  the  vividness  of  a  dream,  but  can  just  as  little 
draw  near  or  touch  them. 

The  Heraclitean  philosophy  of  Traj^ra  pet,  that  his 
opponent,  Nietzsche,  made  much  of,  Dostoevsky  ex- 
hibits in  the  shifting  scenes  of  the  inner  life  which  bear 
all  his  creations  away  and  out  of  reach  with  almost  a 
Greek  sense  of  fate— but  one  that  proceeds  not  from 
without  but  from  within.  All  things  flow  in  the  pages 
of  Dostoevsky  and  escape  into  darkness  in  a  fashion  that 
leaves  no  room  for  laughter  or  tears,  but  only  for  eternal 
terrors  or  eternal  hopes.  In  a  book  of  Dostoevsky's 
you  seem  to  stand  upon  the  Styx  with  Charon,  and  to  be 
allowed  to  watch  (before  your  turn  comes)  the  passage 

[ii6] 


ot  restless  shades  across  into  the  eternities  of  judgment. 

I  have  said  that  Dostoevsky  was  a  good  psychologist 
but  a  poor  sociologist.  He  is  a  wizard  in  his  knowledge 
of  the  inner  workings  of  the  soul,  but  he  is  a  child  in  his 
knowledge  of  the  workings  of  social  institutions.  He 
ignores  the  philosophy  of  history  and  what  we  can  learn 
from  a  study  of  institutions;  he  ignores  the  power  of 
predominating  environment;  he  is  not  interested  in  eco- 
nomics. Man's  history  to  him  is  only  inner  and  seems/ 
to  proceed  unerringly  under  one  set  of  institutions  as'l 
another;  under  one  economic  theory  as  another;  under 
a  czar  as  under  a  democracy;  under  serfdom  as  under' 
freedom.  But  what  becomes  of  his  motifs  if  Russia 
were  a  different  sort  of  country.  If  it  had  a  financial 
provision  for  poor  students  such  as  America  has,  there 
would  have  been  no  "Crime  and  Punishment."  If 
Russia  did  not  permit  idiot  girls  to  run  loose  and  unpro-  j 
tected  in  its  villages,  there  would  have  been  no  Kara- 
mazov  Brothers.  Without  its  rigid  class  systern,  there 
would  have  been  neither  "The  Idiot"  nor  "The  Pos- 
sessed." His  themes  after  all  are  temporary  not  eternal 
and  are  given  him  by  circumstances  not  the  soul. 

Dostoevsky 's  traits  are  more  Oriental  than  Occi- 
dental. Ethnologists  tell  us  that  the  Russians  are  not 
Asiatics  but  Aryans  with  Tartar  and  Mongol  groups. 
But  the  mysticism  of  Dostoevsky  and  its  contentment 
with  conditions;  the  asceticism  of  Tolstoi  and  its  non- 
resistance  are  Asiatic  not  European.     These  traits  of 

I117] 


thought  are  peculiarly  Oriental; — the  tidelessness  of 
destiny;  the  undifferentiated  centuries;  the  indifference 
to  conditions;  the  fear  of  desire;  the  dread  of  change; 
the  unwillingness  to  see  man's  hand  consciously  at  work 
in  constructive  evolution  of  social  life.  All  these  atti- 
tudes belong  more  to  the  East  than  to  the  West. 

Dostoevsky  is  a  revivalist  not  a  revolutionist.  He  ques- 
tions no  fundamentals.  His  range  of  ideas  is  not  wide 
He  is  intense  not  broad.  He  does  not  awake  you  to  a 
new  social  view  as  Bernard  Shaw  continually  does;  but 
he  arouses  you  to  a  new  view  of  yourself  and  your  own 
action.  This  is  the  function  of  the  saint; — this  purifica- 
tion of  the  heart  on  the  basis  of  the  received  standards, 
as  if  these  standards  were  final. 

I  do  not  know  an  institution  that  Dostoevsky  ques- 
tioned. He  certainly  made  sincere  submission  to  Rus- 
sian autocracy;  he  fell  in  love  with  the  Holy  Synod;  he 
believed  in  the  Bible,  in  Immortality,  in  monogamy, 
even  in  Siberia.  In  fact,  he  kissed  the  rod  and  gladly 
accepted  everything  passed  out  to  him.  He  was  inter- 
ested in  clarifying  and  utilizing  the  present  status. 
He  had  not  learned  the  strange  lesson  that  discontent 
and  an  enlargement  of  our  position  in  the  world,  are  of 
the  essence  of  spiritual  progress.  That  activity,  as  well 
as  contemplation,  has  salutary  use  in  regulating  the  dis- 
orders of  the  soul  and  that  outer  struggle  promotes  inner 
growth. 

The  character  in  English  literature  which  most  puzzles 
[118I 


English  critics  and  is  most  unlike  the  English  nature, 
Hamlet,  is  the  prototype  of  the  Russian  nature.  The 
first  time  I  saw  The  Karamazov  Brothers  was  at  the 
hands  of  Orleneff  arid  Nazimova,  who  were  acting  in  a 
theatre  in  the  Bowery  near  Grand  Street.  I  found  my- 
self seated  just  in  front  of  Richard  Watson  Gilder  and 
Mr.  Cahan  of  the  Jewish  Daily  Forward.  As  the  play 
went  on  Mr.  Cahan  whispered  to  me  explanations.  I 
remember  especially  his  insistence  on  the  Hamlet-like 
quality  of  Russian  character — its  indecision  in  action. 
The  trait  is  more  Oriental  than  European.  This  type 
receives  more  pleasure  from  contemplating  its  weakness ' 
of  will  and  want  of  action,  than  in  starting  the  needed 
undertaking.  This  is  a  well-known  psychological  dis- 
sociation of  personality.  Dr.  Hall  Bernard,  in  his 
"Psychology  of  Insanity,"  quotes  Amiel  as  another  illus- 
tration. "I  very  soon  discovered  that  it  was  simpler 
for  me  to  give  up  a  wish  than  to  satisfy  it.  I  have  been 
ashamed  to  desire."  What  becomes  of  self-abnegation, 
pacificism,  the  killing  of  desire,  and  of  passive  obedience 
under  this  searching  scrutiny  of  modern  psychology? 
They  are  transformed  into  anemia,  cowardice,  indolence. 
Action,  which  today  is  a  psychological  cure  for  many 
distempers  of  the  soul,  would  perish  in  the  triumph  of 
quietism. 

Dostoevsky,  while  he  denied  the  power  of  environ- 
ment as  against  the  power  of  the  spirit,  was  himself  de- 
pendent upon   environment.     In    1868   he   wrote   from 

[119] 


Milan:  "I  am  only  heavy-hearted,  homesick  and  un- 
certain of  my  position;  my  debt,  etc.,  deject  me  horribly. 
And  besides,  I  have  been  so  alienated  from  Russian  life 
that  I  find  it  difficult,  lacking  fresh  Russian  impressions 
as  I  do,  to  write  anything  at  all.  Only  think — for  six 
months  I  haven't  seen  a  single  Russian  newspaper." 

Dostoevsky,  who  seems  so  incredibly  fertile  in  imagina- 
tion, had  to  write,  it  appears,  with  his  eye  on  the  object. 
His  Imagination  depended  upon  the  facts,  upon  what  his 
eyes  looked  out  upon.     Yet  he  cared  only  for  the  inward. 

He  was  a  romantic  realist  although  dealing  with  the 
inner  life.  He  did  not  spin  his  story  out  of  himself, 
but  constructed  it  out  of  the  life  around  him.  He  even 
went  to  the  newspapers  for  facts  and  found  there  a  great 
deal  of  his  most  telling  material.  With  the  imagination 
of  Poe  he  had  some  of  the  methods  of  Zola. 
/  How  surprising  then  that  one  who  was  constantly 
looking  outside  himself  to  understand  himself,  in  short, 
goes  to  the  world  to  understand  the  soul,  should  not 
have  cared  more  what  sort  of  a  world  surrounded  the 
soul.  Why  did  he  not  care  about  Russia's  exhibition  of 
social  and  economic  change? 

Dostoevsky's  emphasis  upon  the  inward  rather  than 
the  outward  is  not  only  the  result  of  his  genius,  of  his 
faith  in  spiritual  things;  of  his  devotion  to  a  people  denied 
large  expression  in  institutions;  it  is  also  the  result  of  his 
infirmity. 

[120] 


VI. 

The  abnormalities  of  Dostoevsky  physically,  should  be 
noted  because  it  may  be  a  door  for  the  understanding 
of  his  social  obtuseness  in  the  larger  place  of  possible 
reconstruction,  which  furnishes  the  program  of  the 
Russian  revolutionist.  Dostoevsky  had  no  faith  in  their 
program.  He  had  masterly  psychology;  he  had  no 
sociology.  How  can  such  limitations  exist  in  geniuses? 
We  see  this  limitation  in  all  specialists. 

Dostoevsky 's  own  problems  were  perversely  personal 
— his  epilepsy,  his  strange  moods  and  diseased  sensibili- 
ties. He  naturally  attributed  an  equally  personal  note 
to  all.  He  could  not  see  a  normal  advance  of  a  health- 
fully-minded nationaHty,  by  means  of  discussion  and 
reform.  He  could  not  see  the  disappearance  of  some 
of  his  passionate  criminals  with  the  extension  of  oppor- 
tunity for  free  self-expression.  He  imputed  his  patho- 
logical problems  to  the  whole  of  Russia.  He  recom- 
mended everyone  to  take  the  medicine  that  helped  him 
in  his  own  epilepsy.  Like  the  doctor  in  the  anecdote, 
he  was  master  of  the  situation  when  his  patient  had  fits 
and  must  first  throw  him  into  fits  as  the  road  to  recovery. 

"The  fits  of  epilepsy  are  very  striking  occurrences, 
and  appear,  at  first  sight,  to  be  sui  generis,  and  to  be  like 
nothing  else  that  occurs  in  the  human  body;  but,  upon 
careful  study,  other  recurring  crises  are  found  to  take 
place,  which  have  at  least  this  in  common  with  epilepsy — 
that  they  are  recurring  crises.     In  the  common  epileptic 

[121] 


fit,  consciousness  is  lost,  the  patient  suddenly  falls  sense- 
less and  powerless;  and  while  he  is  thus  unconscious,  the 
muscles  of  the  whole  body  are  convulsed  for  the  space  ot 
some  seconds,  or  of  a  minute  or  two.  On  the  cessation 
of  the  convulsion,  the  patient  is  still  senselessorcomatose, 
and  this  coma  gradually  lightens  into  sleep,  from  which 
the  patient  at  length  awakes,  or  can  be  aroused.  Of 
the  time  that  he  was  senseless,  of  his  fall,  of  his  con- 
vulsions, he  remembers  nothing  when  he  emerges  from 
his  sleep.  This  is  the  ordinary  course  of  events;  but  it  is 
subject  to  many  variations."  ("Crime  and  Insanity," 
Charles  Mercier,  pages  59-60.) 

In  addition  to  his  epileptic  attacks  he  had  mysterious 
fears.  "There  was,"  he  said,  "a  frightful  fear  of  some- 
thing which  I  cannot  define,  of  something  which  I  cannot 
conceive,  which  does  not  exist,  but  which  rises  before  me 
as  a  horrible,  distorted,  inexorable,  and  irrefutable  fact." 
This  habitual  condition  was  so  distressing  that  his  epi- 
leptic attacks  became  the  most  comfortable  moments 
of  his  life.  "During  these  times,"  he  wrote,  "I  experi- 
enced a  sensation  of  happiness  which  does  not  exist  in 
my  ordinary  condition  and  of  which  I  cannot  give  you 
any  idea."  "You  happy,  well  people,"  said  he,  according 
to  Sophie  Kovalevsky,  "have  no  idea  of  the  happiness 
which  we  poor  epileptics  experience  a  second  before  the 
attack.  Mohammed  certainly  saw  Paradise  in  an  epi- 
leptic attack,  for  he  had  these  attacks  just  as  I  have." 

[  122] 


I  have  already  pointed  out  how  rigorously  he  analyzed 
the  character  of  Raskolnikoff. 

Dostoevsky's  condition  (concludes  Ossip  Lourie)  never 
went  as  far  as  dementia,  but  the  progressive  weakening 
of  his  critical  sense  was  undeniable.  It  is  to  this  that  we 
should  look  for  the  cause  of  all  the  contradictions  with 
which  his  life  and  his  works  were  filled.  This  certainly 
is  one  of  the  characteristics  of  the  semi-insane. 

Loygue,  who  has  thoroughly  studied  the  psychology  of 
Dostoevsky,  gives  the  following  information  regarding 
his  heredity  and  the  onset  of  the  disease.  One  aunt  had 
"a  very  weak  memory  without  any  strength  of  character 
or  resolution.  She  was  susceptible  to  every  passing 
influence.    She  was  afraid  of  devils."* 

To  his  brother  Michael,  Dostoevsky  wrote  from 
Siberia:  "I  have  received  your  letter.  I  am  afraid  that 
your  attacks  will  become  like  mine."  In  his  earliest 
years  he  had  nocturnal  terrors,  and  in  his  later  childhood 
frequent  hallucinations.  A  friend  of  Dostoevsky,  in  his 
youth,  who  had  witnessed  his  attacks,  has  also  stated  to 
Melchoir  de  Vogue  that  at  this  period  he  would  fall  in 
the  street,  frothing  at  the  mouth."* 

"That  there  is  any  relation  between  epilepsy  and  feeble- 
mindedness in  a  hereditary  way,  that  is  to  say,  that 
an  epileptic  person  is  more  apt  to  have  feeble-minded 
children,  or  vice  versa,  our  data  give  little  evidence 

*The  Semi-Insane,  Joseph  Grasset,  translated  by  Smith  E.  JellifFe, 

p.  197.      fThe  same,  p.  198. 

[123] 


beyond  the  fact  that  epilepsy  seems  often  to  indicate  a 
neuropathic  condition,  and  that  in  such  families  feeble- 
mindedness may  appear."* 

Orchorsky  says  that  in  Russia  comparatively  few  of  the 
insane  are  shut  up.  He  computes  that  there  are  a  hun- 
dred thousand  insane  persons  at  large  in  the  community. 
Undoubtedly,  many  of  these  insane  or  semi-insane,  living 
without  restraint  in  Russian  cities  and  villages,  account 
.  for  the  number  of  suicides  and  other  acts  of  violence,  as 
well  as  for  the  nature  of  many  of  Dostoevsky's  characters. 
It  has  been  reckoned  that  Dostoevsky  exhibits  in  his 
novels  forty  types  of  sick  people.  He  not  only  accepts 
the  view  of  moral  responsibility  for  his  defectives  but  he 
assigned  especial  value  to  the  utterances  of  his  simple- 
tons. 

While  it  is  well  understood  that  there  is  value  to  the 
intellect  received  from  nervous  disorders  of  a  certain  type, 
the  idiot  and  defective  are  not  in  this  class.  Their  con- 
dition is  due  to  degenerate  conditions  in  which  no  superior 
intellectual  power  can  possibly  rise. 

In  Shakespeare's  time  idiots  were  called  "innocents," 
and  it  was  believed  they  (like  little  children)  were  nearer 
to  God,  and  peculiarly  under  his  care.  In  other  words, 
Dostoevsky's  sympathy  for  a  class  of  mental  defectives, 
such  as  naturals  and  simpletons,  is  really  evidence  of  the 
high  regard  in  which  they  were  held  in  olden  times  and 
the  opinion  at  that  time  that  they  were  mediums  of  truth. 

*Fceblc-Mindedness.     Henry  H.  Goddard,  p.  513. 
[124] 


Again,  what  becomes  of  Dostoevsky's  mysticism,  as 
supernatural  intercourse  with  the  divine,  so  largely  his 
method  of  personal  enlightenment.  His  confidence  in  the 
soul  as  the  only  force;  his  attention  to  the  mysterious 
bacikground  of  moral  judgment  in  ignorant  peasants;  his 
loyalty  to  the  traditional  religious  habits  of  the  Russian 
people,  produce  his  confidence  in  mystic  revelation.  But 
today  mysticism  itself  is  revealed  to  science  as  an  in- 
telligible method  subject  to  psychic  and  social  law. 
"Mysticism  in  its  full  historical  meaning,  is  as  much  a 
slow  accretion,  a  group  product,  as  is  art,  or  grammar  or 
mathematics."* 

"But  the  mystical  experience  itself  as  it  bursts  upon 
the  soul  is  a  unifying,  fusing,  intensifying  inward 
event.  It  may  not  bring  new  facts,  it  may  open  no  door 
to  oracular  communications,  it  may  not  be  a  gratuitous 
largesse  of  knowledge;  but  it  enables  a  soul  to  SEE  what 
it  knows,  to  seize  by  a  sudden  insight  the  long  results  of 
the  slow-footed  experience,  to  get  possession  of  regions  of 
the  self  which  are  ordinarily  beyond  its  hail;  to  fuse  its 
truth  with  the  heat  of  conviction  and  to  flood  its  ele- 
mental beliefs  with  a  new  depth  of  feeling.  This  dynamic 
inward  event  is  not  dependent  upon  any  peculiar  stock  of 
ideas  and  is  not  confined  to  what  is  usually  called  the  pur- 
view of  religion;  it  is  the  sudden  transcendence  of  our  usual 
fragmentary  island  of  reality  and  the  momentary  dis- 

*Harvard  Theological  Review,  April,  1915,  p.  165. 
[125] 


covery  of  the  WHOLE  to  which  we  belong.     We  can 
best  help  our  age  toward  a  real  revival  of  Mysticism  as  an 
elemental  aspect  of  religious  life,  not  by  formulating  an 
esoteric  'mystic  way,'  not  by  clinging  to  the  outgrown 
metaphysic  to  which  Mysticism  has  been  allied,  but  by 
emphasizing  the  reality  of  mystical  experience,  by  in- 
sisting on  its  healthy  and    normal    character,  and  by 
indicating  ways  in  which  such  dynamic  experiences  can 
be  fostered  and  realized,"* 
!       The  dissociation  common  in  epilepsy  may  be  a  ground 
I  of  intenser  powers  of  concentration,  of  putting  away  the 
world,  which  distracts  and  prevents  in  most  of  us  the 
I  emergence  of  great  thought. 

VII 

Dostoevsky  has  to  be  treated  as  more  than  a  great 
literary  figure:  he  has  to  be  taken  as  a  European  figure, 
a  prophet  with  a  religious  method.  What  are  we  to  say 
about  his  mysticism,  his  opposition  to  western  ideas,  his 
gospel  of  weakness? 

So  far  as  his  mysticism  was  confidence  in  the  depth  of 
the  soul,  it  can  be  accepted  as  permanently  true.  But 
his  opposition  to  western  ideas  was  ignorance  of  the 
philosophy  of  history  and  of  theories  of  economics. 
One  institution  is  better  than  another,  one  theory  more 
serviceable.  To  ignore  sociology  and  see  no  salvation 
through  superior  institutions  is  to  be  blind  to  the  past 

*Harvard  Theological  Review,  April,  1915  — p.  165. 
f  126I 


and  to  the  economic  revelation  of  the  present.  It  is  to 
deny  the  findings  of  modern  psychology  that  the  ethical 
is  produced  by  the  social. 

My  interest  in  Dostoevsky,  beyond  my  delight  in 
reading  him,  came  from  the  challenge  he  hurled  against 
modern  Europe — against  the  use  of  force;  the  value  of 
science;  the  Roman  Church  and  Socialism.  Opposed  to 
these  he  set  up  the  spiritual  qualities  of  the  Russian  peo- 
ple— meekness,  patience  and  pity — and  believed  that  the  I 
Russian  Church  by  using  these  would  cure  Europe's  ills. 

Strangely  enough  we  of  today  have  just  seen  a  battle 
royal  between  the  opposing  principles  of  Dostoevsky  and 
Nietzsche — between  the  crucified  man  and  the  superman. 
At  the  present  moment  the  superman  has  been  laid  low 
and  the  meekness  and  the  patience  of  the  Russian  people 
have  been  the  wonder  of  the  world — in  their  successful 
political  revolution;  in  their  intrepid  warding  off  of  Eng- 
land,   America,     Poland     and     France, and     eastern 

allies,  and  in  their  tremendous  effort  to  organize  a  form 
of  economic  life  more  brotherly  than  capitalism. 

If  the  will  to  power  has  worked  so  badly  that  its  pro- 
tagonist, a  former  emperor,  is  a  prisoner,  the  world  may 
now  give  an  opportunity  to  Dostoevsky's  ideal — the 
power  of  meekness.  Dostoevsky  believes  that  the  world 
is  to  be  saved  by  the  Christ  of  the  Russian  people,  not  by 
a  hierarchy  but  by  the  living  figure  of  patience,  humility, 
meekness  and  pity.  We  have  seen  that  the  Russian 
people  are  particularly  gifted  with  these  qualities.     We 

[  127] 


have  seen  that  they  themselves  believe  they  are  appointed 
to  change  and  save  Europe,  while  Europe  and  America 
have  been  afraid  that  this  Russian  program  might  be 
carried  out. 

In  this  very  September,  1922,  the  Russian  people 
announce  that  they  do  not  believe  in  force  and  will  not 
go  to  war  against  the  Turks;  so  Dostoevsky's  theory  has 
become  our  practical  problem. 

Professor  Carver,  of  Harvard  College,  has  said  some- 
thing highly  illuminating  about  meekness.  He  says 
that  meekness  is  "teachableness."  The  most  teachable 
nation  will  be  the  victorious  nation.  As  for  humility,  it 
is  a  condition  of  teachableness.  These  two  misunder- 
stood Christian  qualities  must  always  go  together.  With 
them  always  will  go  piteousness,  or  a  perception  of  the 
handicap  under  which  millions  of  lives  are  lived. 

There  is  no  question  that  the  two  great  wishes  of 
humanity  are  for  physical  health  and  for  financial 
security.  The  religion  of  the  Russian  people  is  at  present 
based  on  financial  security.  The  Russian  sects  which 
are  in  revolt  from  the  orthodox  church,  have  been  strongly 
on  the  side  of  the  revolutionary  movement.  When  eco- 
nomics and  mysticism  join  it  is  very  likely  we  shall  see 
extraordinary  and  creative  results.  Events  seem  to  have 
justified  Dostoevsky's  greatest  prophecy. 


128 


The  Elegiac  Tone  in  Sculpture 

jkT  the  unveiling  of  the  monument  to  General  Joe 
/  ^  Hooker,  in  Boston  some  years  ago,  another 
^  m.  famous  general  of  the  Civil  War,  General  Dan 
Sickles,  fell  into  conversation  with  a  friend  of  mine,  about 
St.  Gaudens'  statue  of  General  Sherman,  which  stands 
at  the  main  entrance  of  New  York's  great  park.  "I  do 
not  like  it,"  General  Sickles  cried  out,  "It's  senseless." 
"What's  that  woman  doing  under  the  horse's  feet} 
She  shouldn't  be  there." 

From  Paris  comes  a  similar  complaint  of  Bouchier's 
statue  of  Renan.  "The  figure  of  Renan,  which  ought 
to  stand  forth  in  great  prominence"  the  critic  claims,  "is 
secondary  to  that  of  the  goddess  of  reason.  This  draws 
the  spectator's  attention  away  from  the  philosopher 
commemorated  by  the  statue." 

The  Boston  Committee  charged  with  the  securing  of  a 
monument  to  Colonel  Robert  Shaw,  got  it  into  their 
heads,  some  twelve  years  after  the  order  was  given,  that 
the  bas  relief  was  completed,  they  accordingly  asked  that 
it  be  put  in  place  immediately.  To  their  astonishment 
they  received  word  from  St.  Gaudens  that  he  wished  to 
place  above  the  marching  negro  soldiers  and  their  white 
leader,  an  angel  of  death,  moving  with  the  troop — in 

[129] 


fact,  he  was  at  that  time  modelling  the  angel.  The 
committee  replied,  "We  don't  want  an  angel  of  death." 
Nevertheless  they  got  one.  Well  worth  working  for 
and  even  a  wrangle;  for  it  was  modeled  from  a  lady  who 
had  the  finest  head,  St.  Gaudens  told  me,  he  had  ever 
seen. 

When  I  was  a  boy  I  heard  of  a  sculptor  who  had  been 
commissioned  to  make  a  statue  of  President  Garfield. 
His  first  sketch,  drawn  soon  after  the  tragedy,  offered  an 
heroic  figure  of  the  martyr  president  with  a  female  figure 
that  stood  below  the  top  of  the  pedestal,  holding  up  a 
wreath  or  a  bunch  of  palm.  As  time  went  on  and  the 
design  was  not  executed,  it  changed.  In  each  new 
sketch  Garfield  became  smaller  and  the  female  figure 
arger:  history  and  personal  interest  decreased;  allegory 
increased.  The  last  time  I  heard  of  this  monument  it  was 
to  contain  a  shield,  inscribed  with  the  name  of  the  his- 
torical personage,  embraced  by  the  arm  of  an  heroic 
Fame.  This  diminuendo  of  the  fact  and  crescendo  of 
the  fancy  struck  me,  at  the  time,  as  outrageously  funny. 
Now,  to  maturer  thought,  it  seems  to  me  eminently 
suitable.  Having  been  done  by  a  great  sculptor  the 
memorial  was  probably  deeply  elegiac  and  beautiful. 

In  the  following  pages  I  am  pleading  for  emotional 
sculpture. 

Aristotle's  dictum  should  not  be  forgotten — that  a 
work  of  art  should  not  be  a  symbol  that  is  a  sign  by  which 
one  knows    or  infers  a  thing,  but  a  representation — that 

[  130] 


is  the  thing  itself.  Yet  the  work  of  art  may  require  the 
use  of  symbols  to  become  a  representation,  especially  a 
representation  of  deep  moods  and  emotions.  The  use 
of  symbols  and  of  other  indirect  means  to  heighten  the 
story  sculpture  tells,  is  the  particular  subject  of  this 
paper. 

The  popular  attitude  toward  sculpture  is  more  ignorant 
and  open-mouthed  than  toward  any  other  art.  In  this 
feeling  of  awe  and  easy  admiration  for  the  image  of 
man  and  beast,  shaped  in  clay  or  stone  or  bronze,  is 
there  not  a  reminiscence  of  old  idolatries?  Our  ancestors' 
crude  wonder,  in  their  pagan  period,  at  the  rounded 
shape  of  the  idol,  and  at  its  marvellous  power,  must  ex- 
plain, to  some  extent,  our  atavistic  pleasure  in  the 
monstrosities  that  fill  our  squares.  How,  otherwise, 
could  we  endure  the  senseless,  kindergarten  modelling 
that  we  pay  for  and  proudly  place  in  conspicuous  po- 
sitions. 

We  can  apply  to  ourselves,  but  with  a  difference,  what 
Tacitus  said  about  the  stolid  Roman  attitude  towards 
Greek  art.  "One  having  looked  at  a  statue  or  a  picture 
once,  goes  away  satisfied,  and  never  returns  again." 
This  lack  of  intelligence  toward  sculpture  is  unfortunate, 
because  sculpture  is  the  first  art  to  be  used  in  our  streets 
for  purely  decorative  purposes. 

We  cannot  excuse  ourselves,  as  the  English  do  for  their 
bad  sculpture,  who  admit  that  they  are  not  an  artistic 

[131] 


people.    America  is  sufficiently  infused  with  other  than 
Anglo-Saxon  blood  to  be  looked  to  for  artistic  insight. 

Two  moods  impel  the  erection  of  memorials  to  the 
dead:  a  desire  to  perpetuate  a  name  in  order  to  extend 
a  knowledge  of  its  virtues  and  its  services  or  else  a 
desire  to  express  personal  grief.  These  two  moods  meet 
in  most  monuments,  which  set  forth  both  the  worth  of 
the  dead  and  the  grief  of  the  living.  To  some  extent 
these  must  always  go  together.  The  greater  the  beauty 
hidden  by  the  tomb,  the  greater  the  mourning;  the 
deeper  the  sorrows  of  the  living,  the  more  remarkable 
the  onlooker  must  esteem  those  to  have  been  for  whom 
grief  is  shown. 

But  while  commemoration  and  mourning  are  naturally 
united  in  funeral  memorials — the  great  monuments  to 
the  dead  emphasize  one  or  the  other.  Either  com- 
memoration is  the  prime  intention,  or  the  exhibition  of 
sorrow.  Commemoration  is  the  commoner  use.  Head- 
stones, lettered  shafts,  smoothed-ofF  boulders,  tombs, 
figures  of  Hope,  Peace,  the  various  Christian  symbols — 
the  cross,  the  anchor,  the  lamb — and  sculptured  like- 
nesses are  used  primarily  for  the  purpose  of  commemo- 
ration, the  decoration  or  departure  from  a  simple  in- 
scription being  expected  to  call  attention  to  the  name 
and  so  give  it  a  larger  and  longer  memory.  We  already 
understand  this  commemorative  use  of  sculpture;  our 
cemeteries  are  full  of  columns,  urns  and  symbolic  figures; 

[132] 


our  public  places  hold  portrait  statues  to  remind  the 
future  of  persons  of  wealth  or  worth. 

In  the  silent  memorial  the  dumbness  of  sorrow  ges- 
ticulates as  if  there  were  no  voice  for  sorrow  that  could 
sound  from  the  tomb  itself.  But  all  bereavement  is 
not  as  willing  as  Mrs.  Browning  to  leave  its  stones 
mute: 

"Deep-hearted  man,  express 
Grief  for  thy  Dead  in  silence  like  to  death; 
Most  like  a  monumental  statue  set 
In  everlasting  watch  and  moveless  woe, 
Till  itself  crumble  to  the  dust  beneath. 
Touch  it:  the  marble  eyelids  are  not  wet — 
If  it  could  weep,  it  could  arise  and  go." 

E.  B.  Browning,  Sonnets  from  the  Portugese. 

The  unvisited  church-yard  set  with  chiseled  stone, 
abused  by  the  elements,  has  seemed  to  compose  a  formal 
and  soon-forgotten  memorial.  Literature  has  prided 
itself  on  its  superior  power  to  conquer  immortality: 

"But  you  shall  shine  more  bright  in  their  contents 
Than  unswept  stone,  besmeared  with  sluttish  time. 
When  wasteful  war  shall  statues  overturn. 
And  broils  root  out  the  work  of  masonry." 
Shakespeare's  Sonnet  55. 

Stone  has  other  uses  than  silent  guardianship;  it  can 
throb  with  emotion  and  convey  feeling  as  poignantly  as 

[^33] 


poetry — yes,  as  searching  as  music.  This  grief  made 
musical  in  marble,  we  do  not  often  find,  so  we  do  not 
easily  understand  the  elegy  in  stone.  Grief  speaking 
in  sculpture  is  more  than  a  commemorative  symbol,  a 
name  prolonged;  it  is  a  poem  visible  and  enduring,  of 
the  deepest  emotions  of  human  nature.  With  this  per- 
petual sorrow, — with  what  may  be  called  the  elegiac 
tone  in  sculpture,  we  are  little  acquainted.  The  elegiac 
tone  is  as  if  the  sculptor  said  to  sorrow, 

"Once  held  in  holy  passion,  still 
Forget  thyself  in  marble." 

II  Penseroso. 

The  note  of  elegy  is  interpretative.  The  spectator 
as  he  gazes  at  a  ludicrous  lump  of  bronze,  inscribed 
with  a  distinguished  name,  is  no  longer  forced  to  be 
his  own  poet,  he  is  no  longer  left  to  envelop  it  with 
whatever  the  name  evokes  in  a  sympathetic  and  intelli- 
gent observer— the  benevolence,  the  genius,  the  tragedy 
— the  sculptor,  if  he  has  the  elegiac  tone,  has  already 
explained  the  meaning  of  his  statue  in  its  composition; 
he  has  carved  an  elegy. 

Hardly  a  city  or  town  in  America  is  without  a  soldiers' 
or  a  sailors'  monument.  But  how  crude,  how  unsug- 
gestive,  how  purely  commemorative  their  stereotyped 
structure!  If  you  see  one,  you  see  all.  A  shaft  of 
granite,  against  one  side  is  backed  a  bronze  soldier  and, 
if  the  committee  was  in  funds,  against  the  opposite  side 

[134] 


a  bronze  sailor.  On  the  two  remaining  sides  are  heaps  of 
cannon-balls.  An  ample,  granite  base  supports  this 
symbol  of  war.  Stacked  muskets,  mortars,  old  cannon, 
bronze  stars,  eagles,  etc.,  vary  but  do  not  improve  the 
usual  design. 

War  should  say  to  sculpture  what  Benvenuto  Cellini 
said  to  a  rival  sculptor,  Bandinelli,  who  upbraided  him 
for  his  murders.  "At  any  rate,  the  men  I  have  killed 
do  not  shame  me  as  much  as  your  bad  statues  shame 
you,  for  the  earth  covers  my  victims,  whereas  yours  are 
exposed  to  the  view  of  the  world."* 

For  instance,  a  war  waged  for  such  ends  as  that  of 
1861  deserved  poetic  treatment.  The  preservation  of 
a  republic  and  the  abolition  of  slavery  are  both  epic 
themes.  No  such  mighty  political  event  associated  with 
such  spiritual  passion,  had  happened  before.  An  epoch 
like  our  Civil  War  in  its  monumental  commemoration 
should  have  found  expression  in  the  most  moving  elegy. 

"Full  of  stately  repose  and  lordly  delight  of  the  dead." 

Commemorative  sculpture  which  illustrates,  poetically 
a  great  life,  and  its  eclipse  by  death,  is  not  confined 
in  its  appropriateness,  to  the  heroes  of  the  battlefield 
or  sea-fight.  But  war  stirs  the  imagination  and  emo- 
tions more  deeply  than  do  the  events  of  peace;  and  the 
veterans,  marvellously  escaped  from  the  jaws  of  death, 
commemorate  their  own  valor  in  honoring  their  dead 
companions. 

*Symond's  Introduction  to  Benvenuto  Cellini's  Life,  p.  38. 
[135] 


Our  numerous  monuments  to  soldiers,  sailors,  generals, 
admirals  have,  at  any  rate,  one  important  justification. 
They  call  attention  to  a  hero's  death  which  in  war  times 
cannot  be  given  prolonged  or  earnest  attention.  A 
soldier  falls  in  battle  and  his  very  companions,  who  are 
in  similar  peril,  must  press  on  and  leave  him  behind, 
must  forget  the  horror  at  their  side.  Even  in  times  of 
peace  we  do  not  attend  with  deep  thought  and  feeling 
to  the  mysteries  and  sanctities  of  death.  Yet  often  the 
most  dignified  expression  assumed  by  the  human  face 
comes  at  death.  This  transient  nobility  we  must  not 
spoil  by  our  indignities;  we  must  give  death  its  due,  and 
interpret  death's  transformations  in  lasting  memorials. 

The  heroism  of  life  and  its  inscrutable  value;  the 
loss  and  its  eternal  threnody  are  often  recognized  long 
after  the  event.  Much  of  our  best  feeling  about  life  is 
post-mortem.  Death  produces  the  pang  and  compels  us 
to  comprehend.  Let  us  hasten,  as  soon  as  we  make  our 
discovery,  to  embody  what  so  inexorable,  so  cruel  a 
school-master  has  taught.  Let  us  pile  stone  upon  stone 
to  commemorate  our  vision  of  life  and  death,  whenever 
it  is  revealed  to  us.  If  death  cannot  be  moved  by  our 
entreaty,  we  may  still  put  into  enduring  form  our 
tearful  prayer. 

The  elegiac  or  poetic  treatment  of  the  military  hero  in 
sculpture  is,  consequently,  truer  to  our  enkindled 
thought  and  feeling  than  a  purely  realistic,  or  a  purely 
romantic   treatment.     Generals   with   plumed   hats,   on 

[136] 


rocking  horses,  pawing  the  air,  like  the  General  Jackson, 
in  Washington,  have  about  as  much  significance  as 
symbols  of  war,  as  the  candy  figures  of  Bride  and  Groom 
on  Wedding  cake  impart  as  symbols  of  marriage. 

War  is  more  than  a  conflict  of  lusty  champions;  the 
result  is  more  than  power  and  fame.  War  is  the  appeal 
of  spiritual  being  to  the  arbitrament  of  force  and  the 
judgment  of  death.  An  intensely  spiritual  motive  pro- 
voked the  greatest  conflicts,  wars  of  independence,  wars 
to  repel  invasion,  or  to  right  wrong.  Such  conflicts 
cry  out  that  there  are  things  more  precious  than  life, 
which  alone  preserve  for  the  race  its  desire  to  live,  self- 
respect,  honor,  independence.  For  the  motives  of  most 
wars  are  to  procure  or  protect  these  spiritual  states. 
So  war  is  a  strange  paradox,  a  losing  of  life  by  those 
seeking  life;  a  using  of  hate  by  those  protecting  love; 
a  brutal  appeal  to  force  and  physical  destruction  by 
creatures  whose  distinction  it  is  that  they  have  souls. 
War  deals,  then,  with  the  mysterious  borderland  of 
existence  where  the  living  cross  to  be  among  the  dead  and 
where  the  spiritual  also  crosses  to  be  with  the  animal, 
where  progress  is  made  by  temporary  retreat. 

But  if  war  is,  indeed,  a  spiritual  array — it  is  not  enough 
that  a  great  general  in  bronze  should  look  like  a  swash- 
buckler, as  does  Colleoni;  or  that  he  should  appear  to  be 
a  mere  mover  of  the  machinery  of  battles,  as  does 
Marcus  Aurelius  on  the  Capitoline.  In  a  great  military 
statue  there  should  be  a  contradiction.     It  should  appear 

[  137  ] 


that  the  hero  is  not  a  self-satisfied  butcher,  or  a  vain- 
glorious poseur,  but  that  he  is  lead  by  divine  necessity, 
flint  only  for  human  need,  and  as  if  he  saw  dimly, 
through  blood,  a  higher  order  and  a  moral  victory  reached 
by  the  road  of  his  fearful  carnage  and  social  havoc. 

St.  Gaudens  has  grasped  this  paradox  in  his  "Sher- 
man." The  man  who  said  "War  is  Hell"  must  look  it, 
yet  not  as  a  saint  would  look,  but  modified  by  a  courage 
that  had  appealed  to  hell  to  right  a  wrong.  The  statue 
must  tell  us,  however,  that  this  grim-faced,  tender 
soul's  ordeal  is  ended.  The  face  shows  the  man  con- 
fronting war — its  horror  and  its  hope — but  could  express 
no  more.  There  is  a  limit  to  the  suggestive  power  of 
an  expression.  So  by  his  horse's  head  moves  Victory 
with  her  palm;  she  is  wreathed  and  smiling;  she  holds  up 
a  commanding  arm,  bidding  war  to  cease,  bidding  hell 
make  way  for  heaven,  rebellion  for  reunion,  the  battle- 
field for  home  and  productive  toil. 

The  elegiac  tone  in  sculpture  is  a  note  of  the  great 
periods.  Nothing  in  sculpture  is  more  emotional  than 
the  class  to  which  belong  the  bas-reliefs  from  the  streets 
of  tombs  in  Athens,  the  tomb  of  Ilaria  del  Caretto  by 
della  Querela.  Michael  Angelo's  Pieta,  St.  Gaudens* 
"Shaw,"  French's  Milman,  Cordova's  tomb  in  Vienna, 
and  Shelley's  monument  at  Oxford. 

The  elegy  in  sculpture  to  affect  us  most  strongly 
should  be  sung  by  one  whom  the  observer  can  recognize 
as  having  grief-stricken  relations  with  the  dead,  or  by 

[138] 


one  who  can  naturally  exhibit  grief.  On  the  Greek 
tombs,  relatives  appear  in  the  act  of  bidding  farewell, 
or  in  mournful  attitudes,  gods  are  represented  who  are 
messengers  of  death; — all  of  these  are  most  somber. 

So  natural  was  the  need  among  the  Greeks  of  a  per- 
ennial mourner,  that  on  many  tombs  little,  floating 
figures  were  sculptured  called  "sirens,"  symbols  of  per- 
petual woe. 

There  is  a  singular  restraint  about  the  figures  on  the 
funeral  monuments  of  Athens — a  restraint  of  fate.  The 
marble  men  and  women  stand  before  us  in  a  thoroughly 
human  pose,  but  they  look  helpless.  They  exhibit  the 
tenderest  relations,  but  cannot  carry  out  their  will. 
There  is  a  strange  inanition,  quite  independent  of  the 
lifeless  stone,  but  to  be  discovered  in  the  inexorable 
diflference  of  spheres,  that  terrorizes  the  beholder  like 
motionless  eagerness  and  paralytic  dread  in  nightmare. 
To  us,  the  living  ones.  Hades  is  visible,  but  no  message 
can  pass.  Minds  are  bursting,  hearts  are  breaking  to 
show  emotion,  but  no  sign  can  be  signalled,  even  so 
much  as  by  a  wrinkled  brow.  This  is  the  excess  of  woe. 
The  living  unable  to  communicate  with  the  dead;  the 
dead  unable  to  signal  the  living.  The  Athenian  tombs 
represent,  marvellously,  this  state  of  tension  in  death — 
the  horror  of  human  separation,  the  torment  of  love  torn 
asunder.  A  clasped  hand,  a  drooping  head,  a  crouched 
body  is  instinct  with  eternal,  unutterable  pain. 

The  Greco-Roman  period  was  lavish  in  sarcophagi, 

[139] 


but  they  exhibit  little  trace  of  that  deep,  poetic  feeling 
about  death — that  sorrow  we  see  in  the  elegiac  examples 
of  the  great  periods.  These  sarcophagi  are  more  orna- 
mental than  funereal.  They  have  bas-reliefs  of  bac- 
chantes, of  warriors,  of  Biblical  subjects,  which  are,  in 
fact,  either  purely  decorative  or  else  quite  formal.  Jonah, 
it  may  be  thought,  is  used  as  a  type  of  the  resurrection, 
but  other  sacred  subjects  are  used  with  no  sorrowful 
significance. 

In  the  Renaissance,  the  greatest  elegiac  subject  is 
that  of  the  dead  Christ  on  His  mother's  knees,  either 
alone  or  surrounded  by  those  who  loved  Him.  These 
kinsfolk,  friends  and  disciples  are  most  natural  mourning 
figures. 

No  crucifix — that  symbol  of  solitude — is  as  sad  a 
sight  as  Michael  Angelo's  Pieta,  in  St.  Peter's.  Jesus 
lying  dead  upon  the  knees  of  His  mother  is  the  most 
sorrowful  sight  in  marble.  His  mother's  bowed  head  is 
a  miserere.  Yes,  human  sorrow,  to  be  sure,  but  what 
other  sorrow  do  we  know?  Is  not  human  sorrow  sad 
enough ?  Must  we  find  a  worse  woe?  Surely  the  mother's 
love  gives  highest  interpretation  to  her  Son's  life.  She 
prized  and  understood  it,  as  even  His  followers  did  not. 
They  called  Him  Master,  but  forsook  Him,  and  in  the 
end,  this  moment  of  Pieta,  left  Him  to  her  again. 

She  cannot  now  gather  her  dead  son  to  her  in  any 
tender  caress — the  frame  of  the  man  prevents;  this  is 
another  element  in  her  despair.     Her  right  hand  only 

[140] 


half  supports  His  shoulder  and  calls  attention  to  her 
weakness.  Maturity  carried  Him  beyond  her,  then 
death;  now  she  stares  at  both  her  enemies.  Utter  help- 
lessness! Utter  hopelessness!  This  was,  for  her,  the 
end  of  affection,  the  end  of  her  dream,  the  end  of  her 
own  life,  too,  since  a  mother's  life  is  in  her  son.  Hence- 
forth, her  days  are  without  expectation. 

She  is  going  over  the  past.  She  can  see  Him  an 
infant  lying  on  her  knees,  alive — so  alive,  and  needing 
her  care — such  great  care — and  responsive  to  every 
touch.  Like  Meleager's  mother  Althaea,  her  heart  may 
well  be  saying: 

"Son,  first-born,  fairest,  O  sweet  mouth,  O  child  sweet 

eyes. 
That  drew  my  life  out  through  my  suckling  breast 
That  shone  and  clove  mine  heart  through — O  soft  knees. 
Clinging,  O  tender  treading  of  soft  feet  .  .  ."* 

Yes,  Mary  with  the  stiff,  cold  body  of  Christ  upon  her 
knees  interprets  His  tragedy.  He  went  from  her  side 
into  life.  Now  a  little  while  and  a  storm  has  thrown 
Him  up  out  of  the  depths  of  man's  passionate  hatred  and 
ignorance.  A  worthless  thing  to  the  world  and  a  de- 
serted leader.  He  is  again  left  to  her.  "Whose  sorrow  is 
like  unto  my  sorrow.  ..." 

In  the  Medici  monuments   Michael   Angelo  used  as 

*Swinburne  Atalanta  in  Calydon. 

[141] 


mourning  motives  powerful  allegory — the  precursor  of 
the  modern  symbolic  figures. 

Night  and  day,  twilight  and  dawn,  are  fundamental 
participants  with  death.  Out  of  such  inchoate  forces 
issues  man  to  a  more  conscious  and  rarer  experience, 
but  brief  although  illuminated;  for  threatening  him 
continually  are  the  same  undeveloped  or  slumbering 
forces.  Lorenzo  and  Guiliano  dei  Medici's  attendant 
figures  tell  the  story  of  man's  momentary  separation 
from  the  brute  and  unconscious  world  of  matter;  they 
pre-figure  his  mixed  and  imperfect  nature.  These 
titanic  recumbent  forms  are  neither  messengers  from 
Hades  or  genii,  but  beings  of  a  middle  sphere  of  the  uni- 
verse which  are  struggling  in  pangs  with  souls  which 
would  be  born.  They  are  in  a  sleep  like  that  of  winter, 
out  of  which  spring  bursts.  The  forces  of  nature  that 
the  Greeks  worshipped  with  such  simple  acceptance  of 
their  perfect  beauty,  their  maturity,  their  adequacy  to 
all  that  man  would  ever  think  about  earth's  energies,  or 
about  the  surrounding  air,  the  stars,  and  the  fastnesses 
of  death,  now  after  centuries  of  new,  human  striving, 
a  Christian  striving,  were  treated  by  the  great  Florentine 
as  semi-conscious  and  almost  witless  forms,  enormous 
but  unawakened. 

The  contrast  between  the  carved  likeness  of  Lorenzo 
and  Guiliano,  noble  but  rather  conventional,  at  any 
rate  alive,  and  the  huge  figures  of  twilight  and  dawn, 
of  night  and  day,  strange  to  man's  mental  world,  sug- 

[142] 


gests,  too,  by  reason  of  the  space  in  creation  that  has 
been  covered  between  the  unconscious  and  the  conscious 
forms  of  life — a  struggle  as  of  something  that  has  been 
overcome  both  in  the  physical  and  the  moral  range. 
The  warrior  figures,  after  all,  have  subordinated,  only 
for  a  time,  these  elemental  forces  which  lie  as  though 
flung  from  their  hands.  The  perplexing,  and  to  spiritual 
intensity,  the  forbidding  inertness  of  the  marble  titans  in 
the  Sacristy  of  San  Lorenzo,  tells  the  story  of  an  endless 
birth  and  death;  of  an  endless  struggle  consummated  by  a 
partial  and  brief  victory.  The  rigid  marble  asserts  an 
old  philosophy  that  nothing  is  immutable,  but  that  all 
things  flow. 

Today  allegorical  figures — death,  victory,  reason, 
genius — perform  the  function  of  the  Greek  chorus  and 
explain  the  situation.  It  is,  too,  as  if  when  the  hero, 
or  poet,  were  to  be  immortalized  in  art,  his  attending 
genius,  that  loveliness  of  fate  or  action  that  made 
his  fame,  emerged  tangible  beside  him  and  filled  the 
artist's  eye  with  a  second  form  which  would  not  quit  the 
side  of  the  being  it  had  guided  and  animated.  So  the 
genius  still  guards  the  life. 

" — that  celestial  power,  to  whom  the  care 
Of  life  and  generations  of  all 
That  lives,  perteines  in  charge  particulare."* 

Bouchier's  statue  of  Renan,  without  the  figure  oi 
Reason  would  be  undignified  and  meaningless.     A  fat, 

*Fairie  Queene,  Bk.  2,  c.  12,  47. 

[143] 


old  gentleman,  sitting  heavily,  not  to  say  gloomily,  on 
a  country  road-side  bench — a  rough,  stone-supported 
slab — wondering  where  he  will  go  next.  Cover  Reason 
with  your  hand  and  see  how  dumpy  and  painful  the  pose. 
Renan,  by  himself,  was  not  a  fortunate  subject  for  the 
sculptor;  a  block  of  marble  had  to  be  cut  very  little  to 
render  his  contour.  His  mind,  even  in  sculpture,  must 
beautify  his  body;  hence  Reason,  stately  and  noble. 
Moreover,  the  actual  female  figure  carries  the  eye  of  the 
observer  up  and  increases  the  impression  of  Renan's 
height.  Reason  not  only  elevated  and  ennobles  the 
monumental  mass  but  it  interprets  Renan's  mood. 
His  weariness  is  not  despondence,  nor  an  old  man's 
misgivings  about  his  career,  when  returning  to  his 
birthplace,  he  reviews  in  strained  reverie  the  scenes  of 
his  simple  childhood.  The  melancholy  question  that  he 
puts  to  himself,  as  he  sits  on  the  rough,  cold  seat: 
"Is  this  all?  Is  this  the  end?"  is  answered  by  the  con- 
fident figure  who  coaxes  him  out  of  his  brooding  retro- 
spect, away  from  the  years  gone  forever,  the  dead  past, 
by  holding  up  to  him  blossoms  of  the  immortelle,  which 
are  better  than  fame's  laurel  wreath,  or  victory's  palm, 
— for  Reason's  gifts  are  enduring  as  the  eternal  mind  of 

God. 

In  St.  Gaudens'  "Colonel  Shaw"  the  elegiac  note  would 
be  lacking  without  the  angel;  the  other  figures  alone 
might  represent  the  review  of  a  negro  regiment,  parading 
in  front  of  the  Massachusetts  State  House.     I  look  at 

[144] 


the  bas-relief.  My  eyes  first  encounter  the  horse  and 
rider:  the  one  headstrong  and  ungovernable,  powerful 
in  his  upward  pulling  of  the  bit;  the  other  slight,  small, 
almost  insignificant.  My  eyes  travel  to  the  pouting 
faces  of  the  black,  bronze  troops.  I  happen  to  know  their 
story.  Free  themselves,  they  are  returning  to  the  south 
to  help  free  their  race.  What  a  marvel  of  new  manhood! 
The  slave  from  the  cotton  field  becoming  himself  a 
liberator. 

But  my  curiosity  goes  beyond  these  realistic  figures, 
and  finds  above  them  the  mournful  angel,  with  cypress, 
or  is  it  laurel  in  her  hand?  Then  the  beauty  of  a  death- 
less procession  envelops  them,  and  my  eyes  fill  with  tears. 
Yes,  that  floating  figure  tells  the  story.  They  are 
passing  down  the  street  for  the  last  time;  they  are  leav- 
ing home  forever.  The  side-walk  crowds,  the  cynical 
idlers  in  the  club  windows  near  by,  the  rigid  officials 
on  the  steps  of  the  State  House  opposite  will  see  their 
faces  no  more.  They  are  marching  away  from  the  real, 
the  things  they  know,  into  the  vision  they  only  guess, 
but  are  willing  to  die  for.  They  are  marching — this 
proud  horse,  this  frail  rider,  these  stolid  figures — out 
of  life  into  eternity. 

Elegiac  sculpture  commemorates  not  only  the  separa- 
tion of  the  dead  from  the  living,  but  also  the  cleaving 
asunder  of  those  companions,  the  soul  and  the  body. 
It  therefore  honors  the  body  by  material  immortality, 
and  naturally  accompanies  those  great  periods  of  civili- 

[145] 


zation  that  most  appreciate  human  life.  The  body  is 
worthy  of  immortality;  beauty  deserves  more  tears,  the 
divine  demands  more  manifestation. 

"But  while  we  are  thus  plentifully  feeding  our  souls> 
we  must  not  neglect  their  companions. 

"Who  are  they? 

"Our  bodies:  are  not  they  the  soul's  companions? 
I  had  rather  call  them  so  than  instruments,  habitations 
or  sepulchres."* 

Such  was  Erasmus'  blending  of  spirit  and  matter; 
such  were  the  higher  religious  conceptions  of  the  Renais- 
sance. 

The  human  body  in  persons  of  great  beauty,  as  Praxi- 
teles shows  us  in  his  Hermes,  has  a  power  of  mental, 
even  of  spiritual  expression  and  not  the  countenance 
alone.  Mind  is  not  dependent  upon  the  face  for  ex- 
pression. Fine  communicativeness  is  not  isolated  in  the 
features.  The  face  is  not  the  only  surface  through 
which  the  spirit  can  shine,  or  thought  be  read.  A  similar 
expressiveness  of  states  of  mind  and  soul  is  found  in 
highly  developed  and  beautiful  bodies. 

Matter  is  being  refined  in  every  direction  and  spirit 
shines  through.  On  a  crisp,  November  day  I  once  asked 
a  Japanese  rickshaw  man,  bare  of  arm  and  leg,  if  he  were 
not  cold.     His  reply  was  a  Yankee's  answer — another 


*Erasmus,  "The  Religious  Tract,"  Familiar  Colloquies,  8,  187. 
[146] 


question:  "Is  your  face  cold?"  "No,"  I  answered. 
"Me  all  face,"  he  laughed  out.  English  nerve  doctors 
are  reported  to  have  said  that  American  faces  are  too 
expressive.  But  nothing  can  be  too  expressive,  since 
expression  is  the  effort  of  all  life  from  the  clod  up. 

Nature  seems  trying  to  be  "all  face,"  all  expression 
and  revelation.  We  assist  nature's  effort  when  we  de- 
velop the  body,  and  keep  it  strong,  supple,  adequate. 
To  be  ashamed  of  the  body,  or  carelessly  to  let  it  become 
deformed  or  gross  is  to  defeat  an  evidently  divine  in- 
tention— and  is,  consequently,  immoral,  irreligious.  A 
heavy,  coarse  or  brutal  countenance  we  all  recognize  as 
a  sign  of  moral  decline;  so  is  a  body  composed  of  de- 
generating tissue. 

The  French  say  that  it  is  necessary  to  make  sacrifices 
in  order  to  be  beautiful.  Here,  then,  in  cultivating 
personal  beauty,  is  a  direction  for  religious  ascetic  zeal. 

"Nor  hath  God  deigned  to  show  Himself  elsewhere 
More  than  in  human  forms  sublime."* 

How  free  of  responsibility  we  feel  for  the  dead  after 
their  burial!  True,  masses  are  said  in  some  churches — 
religious  offerings  which  correspond  to  the  rites,  gifts, 
food  provided  in  earlier  days.  But  we  no  longer  decorate 
and  furnish  the  interior  of  the  tomb,  to  make  poor  souls 
feel  at  home,  and  so  to  ease  their  restlessness.  Our 
silence  toward  the  dead  is,  perhaps,  an  evidence  of  faith 

*MichaeI  Angelo's  Sonnet  to  Vittoria  Colonna. 

[147] 


and  of  humility.  But  after  having  done  this — what  of 
living  memories?  Commemoration,  worthy  grief,  emu- 
lation, good-speech — these  we  should  render  the  dead. 
We  must  bring  the  spent  life  brightly  back  into  our 
lives  by  means  of  the  energy  and  symbolism  of  art. 

Art  confronts  death  with  immortal  beauty.  Death, 
which  to  us  means  destruction,  is  answered  by  beauty, 
which  to  us  means  perfections: — not  physical  perfection 
only,  but  that  which  we  name  spiritual — it  is  so  high, 
so  elusive,  so  alluring.  The  invisible  powers  of  death 
demand  a  life;  the  visible  powers  of  love,  reverence, 
admiration  and  fear  demand  beauty  to  replace  the  life, 
to  commemorate  it — beauty  as  being  what  the  life  was 
at  heart,  what  it  meant  in  the  unseen  harmonies  of  ex- 
istence.    So  art  is  faith  without  creeds. 

How  crude,  cruel,  final  is  death.  The  brutal  has 
triumphed.  If  it  were  not  for  art,  tragedy  would  have 
the  last  word.  But  art  takes  the  destructive  fact  and 
constructs  a  beautiful  immortality,  that  living  minds 
can  brood,  that  living  hearts  can  love  or  fear;  that  living 
lips  can  whisper,  and  that  robs  tragedy  of  its  last,  if 
silent,  vindictiveness. 

Human  nature  is  not  large  enough  to  hold  human  ca- 
lamity. The  world  overwhelmed  by  the  most  hideous 
condition  of  destruction  the  sun  ever  looked  down  upon, 
has  become  callous  and  more  or  less  mechanical  in  its 
response,  either  to  an  enumeration  of  these  horrors  or 
to  their  amelioration.     A  woman  can  shed  tears  when 

[148] 


her  husband  is  put  in  the  coffin.  A  child  can  weep  at 
its  mother's  death.  When  worse  individual  misfortunes 
are  multiplied  by  millions,  there  is  no  corresponding 
personal  or  social  enhancement  of  grief. 

Human  nature  must  not  produce  greater  calamity  than 
it  can  mourn,  or  it  will  be  destroyed  by  it. 

On  the  contrary,  human  nature  flies  automatically  to 
its  own  protection  and  coats  itself  with  a  superficial  un- 
concern or  it  makes  a  spiritualistic  appeal,  in  order 
that  it  may  not  likewise  perish.  This  inability  of  human 
nature  to  arise  to  the  highest  form  of  sympathy  or  to 
develop  feelings  so  profound  as  to  destroy  the  one  who 
feels,  makes  of  life  a  one- window  affair,  from  which  little 
can  be  seen  and  guessed  of  the  whole  of  existence. 

Here  we  find  a  reason,  too,  for  art  because  in  the  ex- 
pression of  art  we  have  embodies  the  feelings  of  the  in- 
dividual as  far  as  they  can  be  felt,  realized  and  expressed 
in  the  moment.  For  swathed,  protected  and  hardened 
human  nature,  the  deep  meaning  of  life  has  to  come  from 
a  thousand  of  these  notes  struck  by  art  for  the  poet, 
the  musician,  the  painter.  So  the  world  in  its  spread  of 
consciousness  grows  to  feel,  what  an  individual  cannot  feel, 
of  the  waste  and  terrors  of  life.  Indeed,  these  destruc- 
tions have  so  much  consumed  his  attention  that  he  is 
not  at  home  in  joy  and  gladness.  In  music  and  poetry, 
joy  and  gladness  are  notoriously  inadequately  expressed. 
Tragedy  is  that  in  which  art  has  distinguished  itself; 

[149] 


just  as  the  Crucifixion  is  the  most  popular  art  symbol 
of  the  Christian  centuries. 

Art  loves  to  move  along  the  borderland  of  life  and 
death;  its  immortal  works  are  like  the  monuments  of 
Gettysburg  that  marks  the  space  where  men  passed  from 
life  to  death.  So  art  illuminates  life  by  showing  it 
against  the  dark  background  of  destruction  and  forget- 
fulness. 


[150] 


The  Last  of  the  Poets 

"  ^^  OON,  the  last  poet  will  offer  to  the  Muses  the  last 
^^^  dove,"  said  Jules  Lemaitre.  "Judging  from  all 
JL,  ^3  appearances  there  will  be  no  more  verse  in  the 
year  2000."  Are  we  so  rapidly  approaching  the  death 
of  an  art?  May  it  be  possible  that  we  ourselves  know 
and  foregather  with  the  last  poet  the  world  will  ever  see; 
that  we  perchance  dine  and  joke  with  the  last  of  a  line  of 
royal  beings — of  a  dynasty  that  for  us  began  with  Homer 
and  contains  the  names  of  Sophocles,  Virgil,  Dante, 
Shakespeare  and  Goethe.  Such  an  event  as  the  end  of 
poetry  will  be  more  marked  in  future  history  than  the 
downfall  of  the  Roman  Empire.  There  have  been  many 
nations  but  few  arts;  for  an  art  is  a  rarer  and  more  final 
product  than  a  nation.  Le  dernier  poete,  though  he  be  a 
weakling,  will  be  more  significant  than  Odoacer's 
victim,  Augustulus,  the  last  Roman  Emperor  in  Italy; 
more  renowned  than  the  last  Constantine  slain  by  vic- 
torious Mussulmans,  at  the  gates  of  Europe.  What  fame, 
even  to  be  a  friend  of  the  last  poet! 

Within  the  ranks  of  the  literati  there  are  aggressive 
enemies  of  poetry  who  argue  that  its  technique,  its  make- 
up box  of  rhymes,  assonances,  etc.,  are  attributes  of 
primitive  society,  like  an  Indian's  warpaint  or  tattoo, 

[151] 


and  indicate,  when  used  today,  a  recession  to  a  childish 
age.  Among  these  traitors  to  literary  traditions, 
Jules  Lemaitre  was  the  most  confident  spokesman. 

"Le  mouvement  scientifique  et  critique  qui  emporte 
notre  age  est,  au  fond,  hostile  aux  poetes.  lis  ont  I'air 
d'enfants  fourvoyes  dans  une  societe  d'hommes.  Com- 
ment perdue  son  temps  a  chercher  des  lignes  qui  riment 
ensemble  et  qui  aient  le  meme  nombre  de  syllable, 
quand  on  peut  s'exprimer  en  prose,  et  en  prose  nuancee 
precise,  harmonieuse?  Bon  dans  les  cites  primitives 
avant  I'ecriture  quand  les  hommes  s'amusaient  de  cette 
musique  de  language  et  que  par  elle  ils  gardaient  dans 
leur  memoire  les  chose  dignes  d'etre  retenues.  Bon 
encore  au  temps  de  la  science  commen^ante  et  des 
premieres  tentatives  sur  I'inconnu.  Mais  depuis  I'avene- 
ment  des  philologues.  L'amour  des  cadences  symetrique 
et  des  assonances  reguliere  dans  le  language  ecrit  est 
sans  doute  un  cas  j'atavisme  .  .  .  Bientot  le  dernier  poete 
ofFrira  aux  Muses  la  derniere  colombe;  suivant  tout 
apparence,  on  ne  fera  plus  de  vers  en  Tan  2000."* 

"There  never  was  and  never  will  be  any  reason,"  said 
Professor  Tyrrell,  "why  thought  should  express  itself  in 
words  which  produce  a  certain  assonance  at  certain 
intervals.  Yet,  as  was  said  of  dicing  in  ancient  Rome, 
it  will  ever  be  forbidden  and  ever  practiced."! 

In  the  opinion  of  other  members  of  the  literary  craft, 

*JuIes  Lemaitre  on  Frangois  Copp^e  in  Les  Contemporains,  p.  83. 
tR.  Y.  Tyrrell,  Latin  Poetry,  p.  307. 

[152] 


it  is  the  imagination,  the  agent  of  poetry,  that  discredits 
it.  This  function  of  the  mind,  they  claim,  is  most  power- 
ful in  childhood  and  in  the  childhood  of  the  race.  An 
art  is  debased  by  so  puerile  an  instrument. 

Imagination  being  then  the  instrument  of  poetry, 
and  children  having  a  certain  vivid  use  of  that  faculty, 
even  Macaulay  asserts  that  poetry  must  be  at  its  best  in  a 
crude  and  childish  age.  "In  a  rude  state  of  society  men 
are  children  with  a  greater  variety  of  ideas.  It  is, 
therefore,  in  such  a  state  of  society  that  we  may  expect 
to  find  the  poetical  temperament  in  its  highest  perception. 
In  an  enlightened  age  there  will  be  much  intelligence, 
much  science,  much  philosophy,  abundance  of  just  classi- 
fication and  subtle  analysis,  abundance  of  wit  and  elo- 
quence, abundance  of  verses  and  even  of  good  ones,  but 
little  poetry." 

In  spite  of  the  unfavorable  prognosis  of  these  doctors 
of  letters,  the  true  worshippers  of  the  Muses,  will  pray 
that  poetry  may  survive  the  year  2000.  The  death  of 
poetry  would  darken  the  heavens  permanently  for  many 
natures,  not  the  most  unpractical  or  passive  or  least  in 
touch  with  their  times.  Mazzini,  the  embodiment  of 
the  struggle  for  freedom  and  nationality  in  the  Nine- 
teenth Century,  loved  poetry. 

"We  have  exiled  poetry  from  life,  and  enthusiasm  and 
faith  have  gone  with  it,  and  love,  as  I  understand  love, 
and  constancy  in  sacrifice,  and  the  worship  of  great  deeds 

[^53] 


and  great  men."*  "To  reveal  ties  and  create  aflFections 
is  the  business  of  poetry. "f 

But  without  trying  to  make  out  a  great  case  for 
poetry;  without  invoking  the  threatened  Muses  in  any 
lofty  strain,  cannot  we  refute  the  detractors  of  the  art, 
even  using  their  own  rather  mechanical  terminology? 
Many  of  us  must  certainly  know  our  own  reasons  for 
wishing  Poetry  well. 

Poetry,  at  any  rate,  is  meeting  the  test  of  our  time — 
efficiency;  it  delivers  the  goods.  Verses  have  accom- 
plished jail  deliverances  that  petitions,  signed  by  eminent 
citizens  and  enforced  by  the  arguments  of  shrewd  at- 
torneys— yes,  even  wet  with  the  tears  of  woman's  be- 
seeching love — could  not  bring  to  pass.  The  New  York 
Evening  Post  .  .  .  was  true  to  its  character  as  a  literary 
medium  in  preserving  the  following: — 

"POEM  SAVED  CONVICT'S  LIFE.     GOVERNOR 
WEST  SAYS  HE  WAS  INFLUENCED  BY 
THEY  HUNG  BILL  JONES.' 
"Salem,  Ore.,  September  6,  191 1,  Frank  L.  Stanton's 
poem.  They  Hung  Bill  Jones'  saved  the  life  of  Jesse  P. 
Webb  yesterday,  according  to  Gov.  Oswald  West.    Webb 
who  had  been  convicted  of  the  murder  of  William  A. 
Johnson,  a  ranchman,  instead  of  being  hanged  at  noon, 
was  the  guest  of  honor  at  a  convict  dinner  in  the  peni- 
tentiary." 

*Bolton  King's  "Life  of  Mazzini,"  p.  313. 
tBoIton  King's  "Life  of  Mazzini,"  p.  319. 

[154] 


"Special  to  the  New  York  Times,  Washington,  July 
10,  191 2.  Pres.  Taft  today  released  from  prison  a  poet 
named  Mary  E.  Brown,  because  she  wrote  a  poem 
which  appealed  to  soft  emotions  and  the  sense  of 
rhythm." 

The  New  York  Times,  Monday,  March  22,  1920. 

"Held  up  by  poet  robber.  Rhymester  with  revolver 
takes  $54  from  bakery.  The  baking  establishment  was 
entered  shortly  after  midnight  by  a  young  man  who 
leveled  a  revolver  at  Kurtz,  and  said: 

"  'Say,  kid,  just  look  me  in  the  face 
I  just  dropped  in  to  clean  this  place. 
So  come  across  with  all  you've  got — 
I  never  fail  to  hit  the  spot.' 

"Kurtz  threw  up  his  hands  and  the  stranger,  keeping 
the  gun  pointed  with  one  hand,  went  through  the  cash 
register,  taking  therefrom  I54,  with  the  remark: 

"  'I  thank  you  for  this  wad  of  dough. 
And  now,  good  day,  I  think  I'll  blow!'  " 

Still  another  example  of  the  Muses'  help  (New  York 
Times,  August  19,  1913): 

"Pat  Crowe,  a  western  desperado,  was  freed  by  a 
Washington  judge  moved  by  an  appeal  ending: 

"  'Not  void  of  all  ambition. 
Nor  dead  to  every  wrong. 

155 


And  I  did  not  wish  to  be  alone. 
I  would  rather  be  where  vultures  rave 
And  fulfill  my  earthly  mission, 
Ere  I  find  the  quiet  grave.'  " 

I  commend  the  writing  of  poetry  to  all  would-be  crim- 
inals. Poetry  is  the  plush-handled  jimmy  of  jail  de- 
liverance. 

After  these  examples  of  the  success  of  jail-breaking 
jingles  we  may  expect  poetry  to  lookup'.  The  poet,  so 
long  a  target  for  editorial  humor,  may  in  future  be  needed 
on  law  faculties,  or  may  supersede  criminal  lawyers. 
Notorious  gun-fighters  hereafter  may  carry  upon  their 
person  amulets,  in  the  form  of  poems,  to  ward  off 
vengeance  of  lynchers  or  the  righteous  sentences  of  mis- 
guided judges — in  fact,  calculated  to  wring  pardon 
from  mob  or  jury,  from  governors  or  presidents. 

But  why  have  poetry?  Why  should  not  poetry  with- 
out more  ado  be  ousted  by  prose?  Cannot  prose  do 
everything?  If  Macaulay  is  right  in  saying  that  the 
deeper  and  more  complex  parts  of  human  nature  can 
be  exhibited  by  words  alone,  if  no  other  art — painting, 
sculpture,  music — tells  the  whole  story  quite  as  aptly 
as  words  tell  it,  why  not  go  about  the  matter  sensibly 
and  say  what  has  to  be  said  in  a  straightforward  manner.* 

Poetry  has  a  recognized  place,  hard  to  destroy.  Cole- 
ridge's distinction  between  prose  and  poetry  is  too  for- 

*Macaulay  on  Milton;  Macaulay  on  Byron. 

]i56] 


mal,  "Prose  consists  of  words  in  their  best  order,  but 
poetry  consists  of  the  best  words  in  their  best  order."* 
The  terms  "best  words"  is  made  to  fill  too  large  a  breach. 
Matthew  Arnold  interprets  Coleridge's  phrase  when  he 
says — "Now  poetry  is  nothing  less  than  the  most  per- 
fect speech  of  man,  that  in  which  he  comes  nearest  to 
being  able  to  utter  the  truth. "t  But  is  not  poetry,  we 
may  ask,  first  a  matter  of  thought  and  emotion  before 
it  is  a  matter  of  "best  words"  or  "perfect  speech?" 
When  a  theme  is  so  emotional  that  it  mounts  into  the 
region  of  imagination  and  is  sustained  and  interpreted 
there,  its  oral,  or  written  utterance  (if  it  passes  beyond 
eloquence)  will  be  poetry.  So  Wordsworth  calls  poetry 
"the  breath  and  finer  spirit  of  all  knowledge."  Dr. 
Johnson  was  nearer  the  truth  when  he  said  that  poetry 
perpetuated  a  language,  because  to  read  it  you  had  to 
learn  the  language,  since  poetry  could  not  be  adequately 
translated. 

The  dispute  as  to  whether  imaginative  prose  is  poetry 
cannot  be  settled  on  merely  logical  lines.  Even  if  we 
must  dare  to  challenge  the  opinion  of  Goethe  who  lays 
it  down  that  a  prose  translation  turns  over  to  a  reader 
the  entire  content  of  a  poem.  But  the  content  of  a 
poem  is  not  the  idea  pure  and  simple  or  even  the  for- 
mulated thought.  The  content  of  a  poem  is  rather  the 
poet's  lyric  mood,  a  spiritual  not  a  historical  moment; 
an  exaltation  of  feeling  which  demands  expression  in 
*Table  Talk.  fEssays  in  Art  2,  p.  128. 
[157] 


one  particular  way  and  not  in  another.  Not  the  history 
of  ideas  but  of  personality  is  involved. 

Every  art  is  an  expression  of  a  spiritual  state.  A  poem 
translated  into  prose  is  not  a  transcript  of  that  emo- 
tional state  which  required  or  even  thought  it  required 
rhythm  and  rhyme. 

Poetry's  use  of  rhyme,  rhythm,  etc.,  is  not  un  cas 
d'atavisme.  The  imagination  being  the  instrument  of 
poetry,  does  not  make  it  out  a  childish  performance. 
The  best  poetry  is  not  the  product  of  early  civilization. 
In  short,  la  derniere  colombe  will  not  be  offered  on  the 
altar  of  the  Muses  in  the  year  2000.  A  literary  intelli- 
gence which  could  throw  out  such  a  hazard  utterly  lacks 
the  consciousness  of  what  constitutes  the  incentive  to 
poetic  expression. 

Dr.  Johnson,  we  saw,  judged  that  poetry  preserved  a 
language.  Verse  lost  so  much  in  translation  that  stu- 
dents, he  was  confident,  would  learn  a  language  for  its 
poetry  who  would  not  for  its  prose.  But  poetry  can 
just  as  little  be  translated  into  prose  of  its  own  vernacular 
as  into  that  of  another  tongue.  If  you  doubt  it,  try  your 
prentice  hand  at  turning  into  English  prose  this  song  of 
William  Blake: 

"How  sweet  I  roamed  from  field  to  field, 
And  tasted  all  a  summer's  pride, 
Till  I,  the  Prince  of  Love  beheld 
Who  in  the  sunny  beams  did  glide. 

[158] 


"He  showed  me  lilies  for  my  hair, 
And  blushing  roses  for  my  brow, 
He  led  me  through  his  gardens  fair 
Where  all  his  golden  pleasures  grow. 

"With  sweet  May-dews  my  wings  were  wet, 
And  Phoebus  fired  my  vocal  rage, 
He  caught  me  in  his  silken  net. 
And  shut  me  in  his  golden  cage. 

"He  loves  to  sit  and  hear  me  sing, 
And,  laughing,  sports  and  plays  with  me. 
Then  stretches  out  my  golden  wing. 
And  mocks  my  loss  of  liberty." 

Or  this  by  Bliss  Carman: 

"She  lives  where  the  mountains  go  down  to  the  sea, 
And  river  and  tide  confer, 
Golden  Rowan,  in  Menalowan, 

Was  the  name  they  gave  to  her. 

"She  had  the  soul  no  circumstance 
Can  hurry  or  defer. 
Golden  Rowan,  of  Menalowan, 
How  time  stood  still  for  her! 

"Her  playmates  for  their  lovers  grew, 
But  that  shy  wanderer. 
Golden  Rowan,  of  Menalowan, 
Knew  love  was  not  for  her. 
[159] 


"Hers  was  the  love  of  wilding  things; 
To  hear  a  squirrel  chir 
In  the  golden  rowan,  of  Menalowan, 
Was  joy  enough  for  her. 

"She  sleeps  on  the  hill  with  the  lonely  sun. 
Where  in  the  days  that  were, 
The  golden  rowan  of  Menalowan 
So  often  shadowed  her. 

"The  scarlet  fruit  will  come  to  fill. 
The  scarlet  spring  to  stir 
The  golden  rowan,  of  Menalowan, 
And  wake  no  dream  for  her. 

"Only  the  wind  is  over  her  grave, 
For  mourner  and  comforter. 
And,  'The  Golden  Rowan,  of  Menalowan,' 
Is  all  we  know  of  her." 

Or  this  by  Gladys  Cromwell: 

"DELIVERANCE" 

"Deliverance?    You  mean  this  empty  cup 
My  days  keep  filling  up; 

You  mean  my  future  into  which  keeps  flowing 
Forever  without  my  knowing. 
The  irresistible  current  of  my  past?" 

These  poets'  moods  required  rhythm  for  their  expres- 
sion and  if  the  bare  idea  were  offered  in  prose,  a  spiritual 
state  would  have  been  recorded  falsely,  a  historical  lie 

[i6o] 


would  have  been  perpetrated.  Nor  is  this  truth  of  a 
special  art  which,  in  any  other  sort,  would  be  falsely 
rendered,  a  "truth  of  madness";  but  truth  immortal. 

If  rationality  and  nothing  else,  or  if  a  procession  of 
ideas  alone  were  the  object  of  life,  you  could  accomplish 
this  transformation — you  could  express  in  words  or  in 
formulas  all  the  arts,  and  reduce  them  to  equivalents 
in  one  art.  You  cannot  do  this.  Phidias  and  Sophocles, 
Dante  and  Shakespeare  are  as  stubborn  as  elemental 
forces  in  nature  and  refuse  to  shuffle  places  or  to  be 
merged  into  the  art  of  Thucydides.  Does  this  not  mean 
that  they  record  more  than  ideas  of  a  historical  progres- 
sion. This  more  I  take  to  be  the  spiritual  warrant  of 
personality,  that  which  gives  it  value  above  the  im- 
personal activities  of  mind  and  will.  So  art  is  the 
joyous  self-expression  of  personality,  and  insists  on 
those  differentiations  that  characterize  personality.  The 
sacred  precinct  of  poetry  being  personality,  a  region 
where  wonders  must  be  seen  as  the  mystic  sees  with 
closed  eyes,  nothing  but  the  imagination  can  behold  its 
raptures  and  its  vicissitudes — the  labors  of  the  soul. 
The  master  work  in  poetry,  therefore,  has  been  the  im- 
aginative creation  of  immortal  men  and  women,  Aga- 
memnon, Antigone,  Electra,  Hamlet,  Lear. 

When  we  assert  rather  proudly  that  poetry  is  the 
work  of  the  imagination,  have  we  not  delivered  ourselves 
over  to  Macaulay  and  to  Lemaitre?  Decidedly  not. 
The  phrases,  "Of  all  people  children  are  most  imagina- 

[161] 


tive,"  "The  despotism  of  the  imagination  over  unculti- 
vated minds,"  do  not  accomplish  what  Macaulay  sup- 
posed— the  relegation  of  poetry  to  the  nursery.  Le- 
maitre's  comparison  of  poets  in  the  days  of  science  to 
children  straying  into  the  society  of  grown-ups — "lis 
(poetes)  ont  I'air  d'enfants  fourvoyes  dans  une  societe 
d'hommes" — does  not  put  poets  into  a  school  for  defec- 
tives, unless  it  be  that  fortunate  company  of  "incurable 
children"  in  whose  society  Lowell  expected  gladly  to 
end  his  days. 

If  the  use  of  the  imagination  as  a  creative  agent  were 
to  condemn  poetry,  the  same  argument  would  condemn 
every  art,  for  imagination  is  the  servant  of  all  the  Muses. 
When  a  painting  or  statue  lacks  imagination  it  is  worth- 
less. What  would  Praxiteles  or  Michael  Angelo,  Millet 
or  Turner  or  Rodin  have  created  without  imagination? 

Commerce,  business  and  finance  need  imagination, 
not  to  speak  of  war.  E.  H.  Harriman,  for  instance,  was 
a  dreamer,  but  by  the  creative  power  of  his  genius  he 
made  his  dreams  come  true.  Otto  H.  Kahn,  in  an  inter- 
view on  Operatic  and  Dramatic  Art,  said  of  Mr.  Harri- 
man: "He  had  a  great  poet's  imagination  but  he  rhymes 
in  rails."  The  French  say,  "No  imagination,  no  great 
general." 

Science,  itself,  and  consequently  civilization,  are  under 
everlasting  obligations  to  the  imagination.  Through 
that  faculty  those  hypotheses  are  guessed  at,  which  by 
subsequent  investigation    must    be  proved   to  be   true. 

fl62l 


Agassiz  saw  glaciers  in  Switzerland  and  dared  to  guess 
that  Europe  and  America,  ages  ago,  were  nearly  covered 
with  ice.  Think  of  this  picture  in  his  imagination  never 
before  dreamed  of!  But  the  uses  of  the  scientific  imagina- 
tion are  well  known.  "Disciplined  imagination,"  says 
Karl  Pearson,  "has  been  at  the  bottom  of  all  great 
scientific  discovery."* 

"Pasteur  had  vivid  imaginative  faculties,"  says  his 
biographer,  R.  Vallery-Radot.  "His  great  intuition,  his 
imagination,  which  equalled  any  poet's,  often  carried  him 
to  a  summit  whence  an  immense  horizon  lay  before  him." 

"Nowadays,  the  qualities  we  call  real,"  according  to 
Alfred  Fouilles,  "are  no  longer  considered  as  anything 
but  particular  cases  of  what  we  call  imaginary.  What  is 
a  Pascal,  or  a  Leibnitz;  they  see  beyond  all  realities,  and 
live  in  a  kind  of  perpetual  dream  of  the  possible  and 
see  in  physical  phenomena  but  echoes  of  higher  harmo- 
nies. Faraday  compares  his  intuitions  of  scientific  truth 
to  'inward  illuminations,'  ecstasies,  as  it  were,  raising 
him  above  himself.  One  day  after  long  reflection  on 
thought  and  matter,  he  suddenly  saw  in  a  poetic  vision 
the  whole  world  'traversed  by  lines  of  force,'  the  in- 
finite trembling  of  which  produced  light  and  heat  through- 
out the  immensities.  And  this  instinctive  vision  was  the 
origin  of  his  theory." 

Macaulay  used  another  illustration  to  prove  that 
imagination    is    a   childish    trait.      "Poetry,"    he   says, 

*Karl  Pearson,  Grammar  of  Science,  p.  ii. 
[163] 


"produces  an  illusion  on  the  eye  of  the  man  as  a  magic _ 
lantern  produces  an  illusion  on  the  eye  of  the  body  and 
as  the  magic-lantern  acts  best  in  a  dark  room,  poetry 
effects  its  purpose  most  completely  in  a  dark  age."  He 
might  just  as  well  have  said  that  because  knowledge 
breaks  in  upon  ignorance,  therefore  it  may  be  expected 
to  produce  its  greatest  effect  upon  a  fool.  On  the  con- 
trary it  is  the  wise  man  who  best  appreciates  the  sug- 
gest! veness  and  forces  of  knowledge,  and  gets  the  most 
out  of  its  new  fact. 

I  question  too  whether  the  imagination  is  strongest 
in  childhood.  At  that  age  it  may  have  more  undisciplined 
sway,  when  experience,  reason,  moral  judgment  have 
either  not  developed  or  lack  material  to  occupy  the  mind. 
Strength  of  imagination  is  reserved  for  maturity  and 
seems  to  mark  the  flowering  of  the  faculties. 

A  necessary  qualification  for  scientific  investigation 
is  that  the  experimenter  should  be  "young  in  imagina- 
tion." The  scientific  discoverers  of  the  19th  century 
were  largely  made  by  young  men.  "Davy  made  his 
epochal  experiment  of  melting  ice  by  friction  when  he 
was  a  youth  of  twenty.  Young  was  no  older  when  he 
made  his  first  communication  to  the  Royal  Society,  and 
was  in  his  twenty-seventh  year  when  he  first  actively 
espoused  the  undulatory  theory.  Fresnel  was  twenty- 
six  when  he  made  his  first  important  discoveries  in  the 
same  field,  and  Arago,  who  at  once  became  his  champion, 
was  then  but  two  years  his  senior  though  for  a  decade 

[164] 


he  had  been  so  famous  that  one  involuntarily  thinks  of 
him  as  belonging  to  an  older  generation.  Forges  was 
under  thirty  when  he  discovered  the  polarization  of  heat, 
which  pointed  the  way  to  Moht,  then  thirty-one,  to  the 
mechanical  equivalent.  Joule  was  twenty-two  in  1840 
when  his  great  work  was  begun,  and  Mayer,  whose  dis- 
coveries date  from  the  same  year,  was  then  twenty-six, 
which  was  also  the  age  of  Helmholtz  when  he  published 
his  independent  discovery  of  the  same  law.  William 
Thomson  was  a  youth  just  past  his  majority  when  he 
came  to  the  aid  of  Joule  before  the  British  Society,  and 
but  seven  years  older  when  he  formulated  his  own  doc- 
trine of  the  dissipation  of  energy.  And  Calusius  and  Ran- 
kine,  who  are  usually  mentioned  with  Thomson  as  the 
great  developers  of  thermo-dynamics,  were  both  far  ad- 
vanced with  their  novel  studies  before  they  were  thirty." 
Even  when  important  discoveries  are  made  by  men  ad- 
vanced in  years,  it  is  largely  on  account  of  this  youth- 
fulness  of  imagination  that  they  are  able  to  outrun  the 
fact  presented  to  them  and  see  theories,  high  generaliza- 
tions, which  at  once  include  and  explain  these  facts. 

The  loss  of  imagination  in  scientific  employment  or 
in  old  age  does  not  invalidate  the  obligation  of  science  to 
the  imagination.  Darwin  lost  his  imagination  in  the 
course  of  his  scientific  studies.  The  members  of  the 
Royal  Society  and  the  Academic  des  Sciences  are  "for 
the  most  part  possessed  of  non-visual  memories."* 

*Cf.  Ribot,  on  Emotions,  p.  16. 

[165] 


The  lack  of  imagination  is  even  a  cause  of  deteriora- 
tion of  musical  comedy.  The  lack  of  visualization  is 
common  among  theatrical  managers.  The  writer  of  an 
original  libretto  has  about  one  chance  out  of  fifty  of 
having  it  accepted.  Henry  Blossom,  after  many  dis- 
appointments, resolved  never  to  waste  time  in  writing  an 
original  opera  libretto.  He  found  managers  positively 
unable  to  visualize  the  characters  and  episodes  in  an 
unacted  play.* 

But  we  must  remember  that  the  members  of  learned 
bodies  are,  for  the  most  part,  no  longer  young.  Old  men 
receive  the  honors;  young  men  do  the  work. 

This  lack  of  imagination  in  distinguished  old  age  can 
not  be  regarded  as  the  terminus  ad  quern  of  high  mental 
activity.  Because  these  personages  of  earlier  scientific 
activity  and  of  prolonged  scientific  interests,  disclose 
toward  the  end  of  their  careers  an  absence  of  imagina- 
tion, we  may  not  argue  that  the  loss  of  imagination  is 
to  be  desired,  any  more  than  those  other  signs  of  old 
age  are  to  be  desired  enumerated  by  Hamlet: 

"The  satirical  rogue  says  here  that  old  men  have 
gray  beards;  that  their  faces  are  wrinkled;  their  eyes 
purging  thick  amber  and  plum  tree  gum  and  that  they 
have  a  plentiful  lack  of  wit  together  with  most  weak 
hams."  Hamlet,  Act  II. 

The  loss  of  imagination  is  closely  connected  with  a 

*R.  C.  Dasher,  The  Dearborn  Independent,  July  26,  1919,  p.  7. 
[166  J 


lack  of  visual  memory.  But  a  lack  of  visualizing  power 
is  a  disadvantage,  not  an  advantage.  If  the  first  step 
in'  knowledge  is  that  of  forming  concepts  from  perceived 
data;  if  the  next  step  is  that  of  imaginative  rearrangement 
of  such  concepts,  and  the  final  stage  is  that  of  reason 
and  logic,  we  are  not  to  infer  that  in  consequence  of  this 
relativity  in  position,  the  earlier  stages  can  be  omitted; 
indeed,  they  are  all  required  for  the  highest  use  of  our 
faculties. 

The  imagination  is  not  seen  at  its  strongest  in  primi- 
tive literatures.  In  Japanese  literature,  for  instance, 
"The  Kojiki  and  Nihongi  have  preserved  to  us,"  says 
W.  G.  Ashton,  "more  than  two  hundred  of  these  (early) 
poems."  "Their  study  tends  to  correct  ideas  such  as 
that  of  Macaulay,  who,  doubtless,  reasoning  from  the 
now  exploded  premise  that  Homer  is  a  primitive  poet, 
argued  that  *in  a  rude  state  of  society  we  may  expect 
to  find  the  poetical  temperament  in  its  highest  perfect- 
ing.* Judging  from  this  early  poetry  of  Japan,  a  want  of 
culture  by  no  means  acts  as  a  stimulus  to  the  poetic 
faculty.  We  nowhere  find  'the  agony,  the  ecstasy,  the 
plentitude  of  belief  which  Macaulay  would  have  us 
look  for  in  this  product  of  an  age  and  country  which  were 
certainly  less  advanced  than  those  of  Homer  in  intellec- 
tual culture.  Instead  of  passion,  sublimity,  and  a  vig- 
orous imagination,  we  have  little  more  than  mild  senti- 
ment, word-plays  and  pretty  conceits.  Moreover,  a 
suspicion  will  not  be  banished  that  even  for  such  poetical 

fi67] 


qualities  as  they  possess,  these  poems  are  in  some  degree 
indebted  to  the  inspiration  of  China.  Of  this,  however, 
I  cannot  offer  any  definite  proof."* 

The  imagination  has  a  psychologically  creative  use. 
It  builds  together  early  sensations,  it  is  the  cement  of 
early  psychic  experience  upon  which  memory  is  reared. 

"Elle  fait  la  beaute,  la  justice y  et  le  bonheur^  qui  est  le 
tout  du  monde.  U imagination  dispose  de  tout."  Pascaly 
P ensues. 

The  imagination  and  its  products  has  educational 
value.  "A  man's  character  and  mind,"  said  Frederick 
Robertson,  "are  moulded  for  good  or  evil  far  more  by 
the  forces  of  imagination  which  surrounds  his  childhood 
than  by  any  subsequent  scientific  training.  The  use  of 
the  imagination  instead  of  reducing  mature  man  to  the 
status  of  a  foolish  child,  develops  the  child  into  the  man.t 

So  the  fruits  of  poetry  will  nourish  the  maturing  mind. 
"Education  in  the  future,"  Stanley  Hall  feels  sure,  "will 
make  great  use  of  these  children  of  the  poet's  imagina- 
tion, for  in  them  can  be  studied  more  easily  than  any- 
where else  types  of  character  in  their  simplicity.  The 
understanding  of  them  even  to  the  extent  of  dramatic 
representation,  modern  educators  assert,  will  become  a 
part  of  the  school  drill. t 

We  may  go  farther  and  insist  with  Matthew  Arnold 

that  in  the  future  knowledge  will  come,  not  first  by  way 

*W.  G.  Ashton's  "Japanese  Literature,"  p.  9.  fL.  O.  Brastow,  "Rep- 
resentative Modern  Preachers,  p.  56.  {Stanley  Hall,  "Adolescence" 
11,439- 

fl681 


of  logic  and  scientific  disquisition  but  through  "the 
imaginative  reason" — that  swift  logic  of  sympathy  that 
knows  the  wisdom  of  the  past  and  the  future.  The  truth 
that  slavery  was  wrong,  that  persecution  for  religious 
belief  was  wrong,  that  he  who  loses  his  life  shall  find  it, — 
these  truths  were  come  at,  not  by  syllogism  but  by 
imaginative  reason.  Poetry  is  not  degraded  because 
imagination  is  its  instrument,  but  exalted  through  its 
dependence  upon  this  noble  function  of  the  mind. 

Finally  the  poet  is  likely  to  go  far  with  William  Blake, 
''The  imagination  is  not  a  state,  it  is  human  existence 
itself." 

But  are  the  forms  of  poetry  necessary — rhythm, 
rhyme,  etc.?  "But  perhaps  of  poetry,  as  a  mental  op- 
eration," says  Dr.  Johnson,  slashing  Milton's  verse 
"meter  or  music  is  no  necessary  adjunct."  Why  this 
"perhaps"?  Meter  is  a  necessary  adjunct  of  poetry  as 
a  mental  operation;  at  this  very  point  lies  the  foundation 
and  reason  for  the  art  of  poetry. 

The  critics  of  poetry  who  belittle  rhyme,  rhythm, 
etc.,  do  not  know  the  findings  of  modern  psychology; 
instead  of  being,  as  they  suppose,  ahead  of  their  age, 
they  are  behind  it.  Music  is  essential  to  the  poetic 
conception. 

The  human  circulation  itself  is  susceptible  to  rhythm. 
"Gretry  has  already  noted  that  the  pulse  is  sensitive  to 
rhythm,  and  he  has  recorded  several  observations  made 
on  himself,  showing  that  the  pulsations  are  accelerated 

[169] 


or  retarded,  according  to  the  rhythm  of  a  chant  heard 
internally.  This  chant  was  not  heard  by  the  eye  from 
notation;  the  rhythm,  consequently,  was  that  of  ordinary 
verse  when  read  to  one's  self;  it  was  not  a  sensation  re- 
ceived through  the  ear.* 

In  the  brain,  too,  there  is  a  rhythm  at  different  times 
of  the  day  or  night  which  proceeds  from  the  different 
degrees  of  sensibility  to  light,  sound  and  temperature. 
These  physiological  rhythms  are  habits  of  organized 
activity  which  have  been  found  advantageous,  and  which 
in  men  are  highly  developed."! 

Rhythm  has  been  shown  by  Professor  Bucher  ("Labor 
and  Rhythm")  to  have  been  an  essential  force  in  con- 
struction civilization,  by  means  of  the  unison  of  effort, 
in  dances,  marches  and  working  songs.  Armies  march 
to  a  step,  and  the  great  weights,  such  as  the  stones  of 
the  pyramids,  could  only  have  been  carried  by  a  rhyth- 
mic-like step.  In  Japan  I  heard  corn  ground  to  songs. 
In  Benares  I  saw  great  slabs  of  stone  carried  on  several 
shoulders  to  a  chanted  step.  "The  rhythmical  labor 
songs  of  harvesters  from  antiquity  to  the  present  time 
are  expressions  of  the  spirit  of  the  group  and  are  of  the 
nature  of  genuine  ceremonials. "t  "A  well  constructed 
phrase,"  said  Flaubert,  "adapts  itself  to  the  rhythm  of 
respiration." 

*Ribot — Psychology  of  the  Emotions,  p.  105. 

fDonaldson,  Growth  of  the  Brain,  p.  294. 

jEdward  Scribner  Ames,  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  114. 

[170] 


"The  love  of  rhythm  is,"  says  Stanley  Hall,  "an  ac- 
complishment of  adolescent  changes.  Declamation, 
music  are  then  practiced  and  the  rolling  of  sentences 
into  cadenced  periods.  These  practices  seem  to  be 
calculated  to  cadence  and  harmonize  the  emotional 
nature.     They  have  a  constructive  value."* 

All  life  is  rhythm  from  a  psychologist's  point  of  view. 
There  are  rhythmic  processes  of  thought  accompanying 
the  birth  of  ideas  which  find  their  satisfaction  and  ex- 
pression in  given  poetical  and  musical  form.  The  Greek 
could  feel  the  joy  of  the  iambic  and  the  sadness  of  the 
trochaic  meter.  Rhythm  in  itself  has  definite  emotional 
effect. 

A  Rondel  or  a  Spenserian  stanza  might  be  called  a 
semi-ready  coat  for  a  certain  kind  of  thought.  These 
seemingly  highly  artificial  products  are,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  psychological  discoveries.  The  sonnet-maker  is 
not  a  foolish  "carver  of  cherry-stones,"  but  a  house- 
hunter  for  a  fussy  idea. 

But  the  knowledge  of  the  technique  of  an  art  discloses 
methods  of  producing  effects  peculiar  to  the  art.  Even 
the  prose  writer  is  not  without  his  rhetoric  and  his  un- 
rememberable  names  for  figures  of  speech  with  which  he 
strews  his  page.  If  he  looks  askance  at  poetry  because 
it  is  not  always  spontaneous  or  extempore,  he  may 
be  asked  whose  prose,  if  masterly,  is  spontaneous?  Did 
not  Flaubert  "seek"  the  word — one    word,    sometimes 

*See  also  Dr.  W.  A.  White,  Foundations  of  Psychiatry. 
[171] 


for  a  week?  Did  not  Pater  write  on  every  other  line  of 
his  ruled  paper,  so  that  he  might  fill  in  corrections  and 
qualifications  on  the  lines  between?  If  poetry  is  an  art, 
you  have  said  all  there  is  to  say  by  way  of  complaint 
of  artifice.  Of  course,  it  has  its  metier — but  rather  less 
worked  out  (if  that  is  any  merit)  than  several  other 
arts.  Nor  is  poetry  cried  down  when  proven  to  require 
longer  incubation  than  prose.  If  art  degenerate  in  pro- 
portion to  the  time  it  takes,  what  shall  we  say  to  a  cathe- 
dral whose  construction  has  outlasted  generations? 
The  mechanical  difficulties  of  an  art  do  not  condemn  it. 
Labor  does  not  discredit  a  masterpiece.  The  length  of  time 
it  took  to  build  St.  Peter's  does  not  lessen  our  admiration. 

The  sterility  of  poetry  in  England  during  the  last 
decade  of  the  nineteenth  and  the  first  decade  of  the 
twentieth  centuries,  contains  here  and  there  a  glint  that 
suggested  the  possibility  of  restoration.  New  forms  were 
being  experimented  with  and  in  the  masque  and  pageant, 
which  were  found  convenient  for  teaching  nationaliza- 
tion, socialization  and  surrounding  the  common  things 
of  life  with  more  beauty,  there  appeared  a  natural  place 
for  lyrics  which  in  directness  of  theme  as  well  as  appli- 
cation to  a  special  occasion,  gave  a  new  reality  to  the 
most  poetical  form  of  verse — the  song. 

To  these  stirrings  and  developments  has  been  added 
the  revolutionary  expression  in  verse  of  the  followers 
of  vers  libre.  Such  a  method  has  the  argument  of  the 
classical  tradition.     Greeks  and  Latins  did  not  care  for 

[172] 


rhyme.  This  is  remarkable  when  it  is  remembered  that 
they  had  languages  with  case  endings  which  could  have 
produced  infinite  numbers  of  rhymes.  Possibly  this 
ease  and  consequent  monotony  were  the  reasons  why  the 
Greeks  and  Romans  did  not  cultivate  rhyme. 

The  English  language  is  particularly  unsuitable  to 
rhyme;  but  tradition  has  been  strongly  in  favor  of  its 
use.  The  free  verse  inventors  ran  away  from  any  other 
control  or  consideration  than  metrical  expression  of  emo- 
tion or  thought.  This  is  a  refreshing  variation  in  English 
verse  and  will  naturally  bring  into  the  field  of  poetic 
production  hundreds  of  persons  who  had  no  gift  or  liking 
for  the  fetters  of  rhyme. 

Outside  of  the  whole  question  of  rhyme  and  of  its 
pleasure  to  the  ear,  free  verse  easily  cultivates  a  more 
every  day  theme  and  deals  with  the  common  and  average 
life  of  the  world  more  naturally  than  the  ornate  tradi- 
tional rhyming.  Here  again  free  verse  clasps  hands  with 
democracy.  Possibly  the  outcome  will  be  a  greater  free- 
dom in  handling  poetic  subjects  and  a  passing  backward 
and  forward  between  old  forms  and  new,  in  the  same 
poetic  composition. 

We  cannot  imagine  a  poetry  which  is  divorced  from 
music,  and  this  means  all  manner  of  beautiful  sounds  that 
appeal  to  the  ear.  Even  where  the  rhyme  has  been  re- 
tained by  our  new  poets,  the  versification  of  late  has  re- 
turned to  the  simple  couplet  which  accentuates  rhyme 
and  form. 

[173] 


At  any  rate,  poetry  was  never  on  the  threshold  of 
larger  hopes  than  today.  Poetry  has  cleaned  house  in 
the  matter  of  technique,  ideals  and  subject-matter; 
it  is  now  ready  for  great  work.  The  year  2000  instead 
of  verifying  the  prediction  of  Jules  Lemaitre,  that  the 
last  dove  would  be  offered  on  the  altar  of  the  Muses, 
may  more  likely  see  the  coming  of  a  poet  to  be  placed 
in  the  list  of  Homer,  Virgil,  Dante  and  Shakespeare. 


174 


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